I had a session today on the Olympus Fluroview Confocal that the EMU owns today. I didn't do anything except sit and watch as the EMU staff ran the machine with our samples and we did some testing with a spectra scan to see if we could distinguish our two ingredients in the sample.
The advancement of technology can be amazing at times. The last two confocals I had used before were the Bio-Rad and the Radiance, but in a few years (about four years or so) this Olympus is awesome.
The lasers are the same though, clunky boxes stacked here and there to generate the power sources but this machine was a inverted confocal mainly designed for cell-culture work, and the room is also a PC2 lab (clean room). The speed that it can scan at, the range of lasers, the speed of image compositing, and the tweak controls for the microscope, it was complex but yet simple because once you set the sample on stage, you didn't really ever have to do anything on it except pull the light source shutter, since everything else was controlled by the computer system. Pretty nifty.
The only thing is apparently the computer has issues and overheats and randomly reboots.... It's using a Antec 182 case (the same as mine) so I know it has the potential for excellent airflow... perhaps they should consider watercooling? LOL.
In any case, it is yet to be seen if I will be trained on it since I might never need to use it anyway.
The advancement of technology can be amazing at times. The last two confocals I had used before were the Bio-Rad and the Radiance, but in a few years (about four years or so) this Olympus is awesome.
The lasers are the same though, clunky boxes stacked here and there to generate the power sources but this machine was a inverted confocal mainly designed for cell-culture work, and the room is also a PC2 lab (clean room). The speed that it can scan at, the range of lasers, the speed of image compositing, and the tweak controls for the microscope, it was complex but yet simple because once you set the sample on stage, you didn't really ever have to do anything on it except pull the light source shutter, since everything else was controlled by the computer system. Pretty nifty.
The only thing is apparently the computer has issues and overheats and randomly reboots.... It's using a Antec 182 case (the same as mine) so I know it has the potential for excellent airflow... perhaps they should consider watercooling? LOL.
In any case, it is yet to be seen if I will be trained on it since I might never need to use it anyway.
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