Digital video camera captures the action in your microscope
Fastec Imaging
This company’s IL5 High-Speed Camera (photo; p. 32) is easily mounted on a micrscope, enabling users to record high-speed video of microscopic events. Both spatial and temporal magnification work in tandem to clarify understanding in applications such as microfluidics, where particles often move through the field of view very quickly, says the company. With four models to choose from, each records over 3,200 frames per second (fps) at VGA resolution, and more than 29,000 frames per second at lower resolution. Able to save images to an SSD or SD card while recording high-speed bursts of hundreds or even thousands of images at a time, the IL5 captures high-speed snapshots of high-speed events, in addition to video. The Fastec IL5 camera can be controlled over Gigabit Ethernet via Fastec software on a PC or Mac, or via the built-in web interface with any web browser on a PC, Mac, tablet or even smartphone. Unlike traditional high-speed camera systems that only record for a few seconds and require careful triggering, the IL5’s Long-Record (LR) option can record at high speed for many minutes at high resolution, to many hours at lower resolution. — Fastec Imaging, San Diego, Calif.