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Hocus Focus: The nikon Eclipse E600 You're sitting in the dark examining a specimen and you reach to adjust the fine focus-oops! You just moved the stage instead. This won't happen with Nikon's new Eclipse E600 microscope because its stage control is on the other side of the microscope from its coaxial course/fine focus control. It may seem like a small thing, but it's one of the features that Stella Tsirka, Research Assistant Professor at SUNY at Stonybrook, Department of Pharmacology, likes best about the E600. Alternatively, you could operate the stage and a low-profile fine focus control with your right hand, leaving your other hand free to operate a counter or personal computer. Another convenience is basic controls that are located low and near the front, so you can reach them without lifting your hands off the table. And if you're not comfortable with the eyepiece angle of 25 degrees, an adjustable head is available that lets you set the angle anywhere between 8 degrees and 32 degrees and lets you move the eyepiece tube forward and backward 15mm. Risers are also available to raise the head in 25mm increments up to 100mm. But how good is what you see through that eyepiece? "The resolution is really great," says Dr. Tsirka. The E600 uses Nikon's new CFI60 chromatic, aberration-free infinity optical system, which incorporates a 200 mm tube lens focal length, a 60mm objective parfocal length, and a 25 mm objective thread size and field of view. The longer parallel optical beam between the objective and the tube lens allows the E600 to accommodate several accessory modules at one time, for example an epi-fluorescence attachment and a magnification changer or dual-port beamsplitter. A seven-place universal condenser allows you to build the system to suit your needs, while universal objectives allow you to use multiple observation techniques, such as brightfield, darkfield, Nomarski DIC, epi-fluorescence, phase contrast, or polarized light, without having to change objectives. In Dr. Tsirka's work the ease of moving between brightfield and fluorescence has proved most useful. She has found it less easy, however, to switch between darkfield and brightfield, which requires switching to a darkfield condenser to obtain the best images. If you need to examine thick specimens or deep specimen layers, you'll appreciate the E600's longer working distances and higher numerical apertures. For example, with the Plan Apo 60x oil objective, the working distance is 0.21 mm and the numerical aperture is 1.40. (Magnifications as low as 1.0x are available.) The E600's vibration-dampening feet are useful if you don't have a dedicated anti-vibration table, and its rigidity and mechanical stability help prevent vibrations when you attach a video camera. Also useful for photography is that the stage covers an entire 1" x 3" specimen slide and allows over 220 degrees of stage rotation. Dr. Tsirka finds it inconvenient, however, that she cannot mount a video camera and a still camera simultaneously, but rather has to remove one camera to mount the other. (Nikon plans to introduce a double port attachment in December that will allow simultaneous mounting of CCTV and photo systems.) Overall, it's worth checking out the high resolution, ease of use, and adaptability of Nikon's Eclipse E600. For more information: 800-52-NIKON or http://www.nikon.com. The author, Betsy Sagey, is a freelance writer based in based in Trabuco Canyon, Calif., and can be reached online at bsagey@ix.netcom.com

An Eclipse You Can Look At: Nikon's Eclipse E600 Mid-Sized Microscope

Oct 12, 1997

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