At SPIE Photonics West, which took place from 16 to 18 February in San Francisco, USA, Belgian research institute Imec was showing its lens-free imaging evaluation system.
The microscopy system offers a super wide field of view of 4.7 x 3.5mm2 at micrometre resolution. It does not use optical lens components, but rather reconstructs an image from a hologram generated by interference patterns. It operates at 20 frames per second.
The microscope kit has been used in investigations into the effects of pharmaceuticals on cardiac cells. It can image an electrical impulse passing through a Petri dish of cardiac cells, whereas a typical microscope objective wouldn’t have a wide enough field of view to capture this event. Other potential applications include cell counting and measuring the amount of dust and particulates in a clean room environment.
Elsewhere at the photonics trade fair, Edmund Optics was demonstrating its Iris adaptive optics kit, designed for researchers to experiment with adaptive optics. The kit includes a deformable mirror with 37 hexagonal segments that corrects phase aberrations to give a sharp image.
Edmund Optics was also showing the capabilities of Optotune’s liquid lens technology in a demonstration reading best-before dates on revolving bottles of different heights. The liquid lens technology adjusts the focus by applying an electrical current to the lens. It offers a focal range of 45 to 120mm.
French firm, First Light Imaging, won a Prism Award in the imaging and cameras category for its C-Red One low noise scientific infrared camera, which will be commercialised this summer. The camera is based on mercury cadmium telluride electron initiated avalanche photodiodes (e-APD), which offer speed and sensitivity in the shortwave infrared (SWIR) region. The camera has a resolution of 320 x 256 pixels, a 24µm pixel pitch, and operates from 1.3-2.5µm wavelengths at up to 3,500fps.
Finally, Pleora was displaying its new Nbase-T development kit, which can transmit uncompressed GigE Vision compliant images at speeds up to 5Gb/s over low-cost Cat5e cabling. The kit is for design of prototypes with requiring hardware development.
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