More on microscopes

Hello, and welcome to my blog. Many of you are probably coming here from the link I provided in my April 2008 Mycena News article about buying a microscope. There are so many good sources of information out there, that I simply couldn't fit an adequate link list in at the end of the MN article, so I decided to set up this blog page instead. That way, I could list all of the links I want to and even have room to introduce the links. (This, of course, is also a good way to plug my new blog. ;)

First off, I definitely want to point out Michael Kuo's excellent "Using a Microscope to Study Mushrooms", an outstanding set of pages on mycological microscopy and mushroom microanatomy.

As for introductions to the microscope itself, there's lots of stuff out there. An overview of basic light microscope types can be found here, while a good introduction to the compound microscope itself can be found here. This page provides a more detailed guide to compound microscope components (a subject I hope to cover in more detail in my next installment). The eBay guide, "Some Advice on Caring for Microscopes" provides a good overview of scope care and cleaning.

An illustrated step-by-step overview of Köhler illumination, the illumination and lens setup I mention in the article, can be found here, and another article that describes it in more gory detail, here.

For those of you with a little basic knowledge who want some more in-depth info on microscopy, you definitely need to check out the wonderful Molecular Expressions, an extensive website that amounts to an online textbook on microscopy, with lots of really nice interactive Java tutorials. The other site I highly recommend is Microscopy-UK, a site I find particularly useful because of its "hobbyist" orientation – it's oriented toward people like myself who have older research-quality scopes and use them for various kinds of natural history/taxonomic applications. (As opposed to biomedically-oriented sites that assume you're in a well-funded clinical lab with all-new multi-thousand dollar equipment.)

There are also a couple of discussion forums on Yahoo Groups on microscopy which are definitely worth a look if you want to delve more deeply into the topic. Even if you don't join the forum, both forums can be read by non-members, have searchable archives, and are really good sources of information on all manner of otherwise-obscure microscopy questions. The first is "Microscope", which is presently quite active. The other is "Microscopes", which is less active, but has a lot of useful information in its archive nevertheless.

On the topic of buying a microscope, I intend my present MN article and its next installment to be a good thorough overview. However, the following guides from eBay and from Microscopy-UK are also quite good and worth having a look at. Another article from Microscopy-UK that's particularly useful is "The Best 'Affordable' Petrographic Microscopes of the 1970s to 1990s". While the focus is on mineralogical scopes, every scope mentioned in the article comes in a more basic "biological" version.

This page on buying high school microscopes is also worth a look, but gives some advice I would not follow if you're looking for a decent biological research scope. Specifically, I strongly recommend ignoring the "no's" under "I see a lot of other features advertised; which ones are worthwhile?" These features are actually something you'd want and should only avoid in "child-proof" scopes for young students.

Finally, if you want to get your microscope serviced (something I always consider a good idea when buying an old scope without a clear service record or refurbishment) or have one that needs repair, I've put together another post with a listing of Bay Area microscope service shops.
Anyway, hope you found my Mycena News article and the supplementary info here useful. This blog does take comments, so if you have any questions or anything else to add, please post.

ADDENDUM: I realized that I also said in the article that I'd write something about the two different Zeiss companies. That grew into an article unto itself, which I've placed on this blog under the title "A Tale of Two Zeiss's".

ADDENDUM 2: There was some controversy on the Microscope list with my reference to a number of microscope manufacturers as "second tier", particularly in regards to Reichert scopes, which are highly regarded. I refer readers to the archived discussion here.