The Photonics West conference includes a gigantic tradeshow spanning 2 halls of the Moscone Center and some of the space in between. I visited on two consecutive afternoon, trying to at least walk by every booth, and picking up on interesting new and/or affordable technologies useful for our imaging core. So, this is an extremely subjective and quite random summary of things that I would like to remember:

  • Vialux. Their new Prime Core provides on axis illumination for a DLP. It can be combined with any of the DLPs they carry. This could work quite well for integration with a microscope, you would basically need to figure out how to mount it to the back port of a scope (needs a lens analogous to the tube lens in the camera path) and how to pipe in the light source. The light entrance is a ~ 2x2 mm window behind which the light is homogenized, so just putting some kind of fiber or light guide real close to that window should work. The unit is ~$12k, the most affordablce DLP is $7k. You could possibly use one of ther LEDs, but a full 6-7 line LED illuminator can be bought for ~$15k, so for $34k plus lenses and mounting hardware you would have a fully controllable DMD attached to your microscope.

  • QubeDot. Startup our of Germany that knows how to make microLEDs and can design arrays at sizes up to 1 x 1cm and emitter sizes of 1-1000 microns, with all pixels individually controllable (i.e. you can send images to these things). Many wavelengths are possible. These things could be very interesting to project images into the microscope as an alternative to DLPs. It all depends on the price point, and that will likely depend on volume, so I hope that someone will take this on and couple these to the illumination path of a microscope.

  • Refined has solutions for Coherent Raman scattering and CARS imaging. I have no direct need, but do not want to forget about this.

  • Likewise, Specto has products to enable / facilitate Brillouin Spectrometry / Microscopy.

  • Pi Imaging makes SPAD arrays and cameras based on SPAD arrays. They have a 1k x 1k array with 16 micron pitch APDs build in a camera that is price competitive with high end scientific grade CMOS cameras. The readout is a little different here as they do single photon counting and read out binary images with an integration time of 100ns (I hope I remembered this number correctly). So, a 1 ms “exposure” would consist of 10,000 binary images of 100ns integration each and the dynamic range would be 1:10,000. The dark count rate is 100counts per second, but I am not sure if this is per APD or for the whole array. Even if it is per APD, the average dark count for the 1 ms exposure would be 0.1, so these things basically have no background. Also, they do global shutter exposure, so no more waiting for that rolling shutter to reach the whole Region of Interest. They are clearly aware that we would like more and smaller APDs, so it looks like we will have a low noise future in imaging.

  • FLIM Labs develops harwdare to make FLIM accessible to everyone. The person I talked to (Alessandro?) came from Enrico Gratton’s lab. A combination of FLIM Data acquisition card, Picosecond-pulsed laser and SPAD Single-photon detector costs ~$18k. All you would need to convert an existing microscope into a FLIM capable system is a galvo scanning unit. I am very tempted to build something with this to bring FLIM capabilities to our core.

  • Black materials are always fun (who has the blackest black?). Koyo Orient from Japan (b.t.w, I love that web-address!) has very dark materials and paint. They gave me a sample with maximum of 0.3% reflectivity that costs about $30 per square meter.

  • Zaber has a system with an automated microscope, plate hotel and robot arm to feed the microscope for something significantly under $50k alltogether. It should fit in an incubator and would make an awesome live cell automated imaging platform. They have a laser autofocus for their microscope as well. They work very well with Micro-Manager.

  • Omicron makes lasers and laser combiners that also work well with Micro-Manager. They have nice compact 4 and 6 laser launches that are quite affordable. They also have high power lasers with for instance a 488nm 2W directly modulatable lasers that I remember to cost around $15k. These may be interesting for some of the light sheet approaches to single molecule and other super fast imaging. They also had these in a laser combiner that could have a multimode fiber as output for widefield (or TIRF) illumination. These also could be very interesting for specific applications. Their multi-line LED illuminator (competitively priced) not only had constant power output but also was wavelength stabilized. I had not realized this previously, but with band-pass filters, wavelength changes can indeed lead to power fluctuations at the sample.

  • FingerLakes Instrumentation Their core business is cameras for the astronomy market, but they were well known for their filter wheels that were very fast and did not need an external controller. They changed ownership a few years ago and stopped making those filter wheels. Now, they changed owners again and are restarting manufacturing their filter wheels. Yeah!

  • Hamamatsu Photonics They were everywhere! Both Fairchild and Toptica signalled they are Hamamatsu subsidiaries. I like that they are not rebranding these companies making it much easier to keep track of things (I am not sure what we should do about micro-Manager device adapters that are fully functional but named after companies whose names have disappeared). I had a very nice time with Jamie Butler and Jim Sims (who showed me some amazing old coins). Jamie pointed out an interesting new light source that consists of a plasma ignited by a laser, hence very high white light brightness and a radiance of somewhere around 100mW/mm2. I do not have direct plans for these, but surely interesting.

  • Excelitas has gobbled up PCO. I chatted with Dr. Gerhard Holst. Their newest camera has about the same specs as the Hamamatsu Quest2, but for significantly lower cost. He also showed me some interesting new gadgets from other companies. They had an image splitter at their booth from an Austrian company called Akrima. It seems to have different names starting with lambda2. It looked well made with nice adjustments, even though I can not (yet) vouch for the image quality or day to day use I will definetly consider these if I’d be in the market for one of them again. He also showed me the GeminiX from a company called Nireos. Their device sits in between the microscope and the camera and turns the camera into a hyperspectral camera. I did not understand the physics, but you take 100 images each with slightly different settings of the device and calculate a spectrum with a resolution of range / 100. Both these devices were priced around $15k. I am very intrigued about that multi-spectral device and looking for an excuse to get one.

  • Alibanal Just to remember, if you ever need a fast physical laser shutter, they sell them.

  • RedPitaya. FPGA boards for development. I always wanted to play with these but have not yet found the project to do so. There was nobody at their booth…

And then the weirdest thing. At the very end of the floor was a small booth with a bunch of binoculars from a company in China. I think they were looking for OEM partners. I picked up a 10x42, it felt pretty good, functioned correctly, and had a decent image (as far as I could judge in 30 seconds indoors). Funnily enough, I ended up bringing it home, will be good when having guests over to go bird wwatching.