One of the joys of having microscopes with trinocular heads is that one can keep a camera attached, ready for quickly capturing that picture. My first venture into video capture used a JVC colour CCD camera, type TK-C621, connected to a MovieStar capture card. The camera cost me £199 and the card another £69 from a stall at an amateur radio show. They worked well and I would still be using that set-up today if it had not given me a problem using my PC on the network. Essentially I couldn't run both the video capture and the network adapter card at the same time. Well, they're both fairly high bandwidth accessories so it wasn't a big surprise.
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I still use the JVC camera but I have changed my PC's video card and the video capture card for a single card that combines the two functions, the Matrox Marvel G200. Now I can also run the network without having to de-select the video capture and re-booting! The performance is good and the software that came with the Matrox card includes the U-Lead video editing application, which allows frame by frame stepping through a video clip, running fast or slow, backwards or forwards, capture of still frames etc. Another of the bundled applications, Matrox PC-VCR Remote, provides a simple way to capture video or still shots. Better still, it provides for full screen viewing of what the camera sees, so now I can watch the activities of my bits of pond life on a nice clear 17" monitor instead of being bent over the microscope all the time. However, even with a reasonable camera etc. the image quality is nothing like as good as what one can see through the microscope's eye-pieces. One 'plus-point' for the camera, though - it is quite sensitive so I can run with lower illumination level and, hopefully, not warm the specimens quite so much! |
The x0.4 adapter fits the Prior ZoomMaster
camera port, whilst the x1 adapter fits in place of a standard
eye-piece or on some trinocular head camera ports.
I recently had a chance to try this product, which costs about £270 and is available in the UK from MicroscopesPlus Ltd. It has a very compact camera unit, about the size and shape of a hen's egg, with fair resolution, which will plug into a standard eye-piece tube instead of the normal eyepiece. It does not require a video capture card in the PC as it uses the parallel printer port (not a 'pass-through' device, however - i.e. you can't plug your printer into the MV box). What's more, it doesn't need a mains power supply as it takes its power from either the keyboard or mouse ports with the supplied Y-cable. Software is supplied to support video and still capture. The software also controls brilliance, contrast and colour.
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