We have been trying to take pictures of what we see through the microscopes. The easiest way has been with a video camera attached to the camera port on the stereo microscope. The little JVC TK-C621 colour camera has a 1/3" CCD giving a decent picture with a resolution of 753 x 582 pixels turned into 470 TV lines. The Matrox Marvel video capture card in the PC and the software that came with it allow frame grabbing (stills) or video clips. Before compression the still pictures take 900 k bytes but using Paint Shop Pro these come down to around 35 k bytes as .JPG files. Video uses up very large amounts of disk space unless the images are compressed - over 100 M bytes per minute before compression.
For higher resolution pictures we can use the Kodak DC120 camera and MDS120 adapter. Not really mastered this yet but some of the results are OK. The camera may be operated through a software "plug-in" for Adobe Photoshop, allowing previews and adjustment of zoom and exposure. I store each picture as a .BMP file of 3.6 M bytes before compressing those that I have put on the Web site to about 30 - 60 k bytes as .JPG files.
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I've been trying to use animated .GIF files to show different views as the focus is changed. This could be useful for thick specimens. The problem is that it's easy to build up a huge file that would take too long to download. Here's a sample file of 416 kbyte using 6 still frames but playing a loop in the order 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2- etc. "Could do better", was my opinion and I shall try!
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