[ScienceShark]

Hello.
We are going to buy a microscope for live cell imaging. Now, after some months of discussion, we end up with two brends - NIKON and Leica.
Does anybody worked with this microscopes? Which brend you would suggest for live cells imaging?

[CharonY]

what cell types are you talking about? But in terms of top-of-the-line microscope for biological research Nikon, Zeiss, Leica and Olympus are usually the brands you end up with.

At this level your precise application and their respective offering, as well as support is going to be more relevant than the brand per se.

This post has been edited by CharonY: 26 September 2011 - 05:39 PM

[ScienceShark]

Thank you.
We actually have done this. And now we end up with this two. I was using the Nikon quite long time, but I'm not familiar with Leica at all. The problem (according on my personal experience) is that the microscope looks pretty nice during the presentation, but the real problems you see when you work long (like some software issues, I don't know, not so many file format support, or mechanical questions, or the problem to keep the cells alive). The cells we use are Cancer cells (U2OS) and HeLa cells, in most cases.

[CharonY]

Keeping cells alive with the incubator things that many offer is kind of tricky, regardless of the microscope, obviously. For the most part we rely on third-party software (as e.g. micromanager or use something that we write in Labview) to control the software, likewise for postprocessing (matlab, for example).
The way we do it, is try to visit a lab that has it up and running and use our samples and do a simple experiment. In most cases it will be down to support and ergonomics, unless you got specialized application, as the optics part in all cases is pretty competitive.

[ScienceShark]

That is right. But for working with images I use Figure Adapter that is quite handy. It works with any graphical format. For the analyzing - NisElemenst from NIkon is ok, but then you still need some other good graphical software like Figure Adapter to convert files to the format you want.
The issue with auto-focus is the important if you gonna follow the cells. Nikon has a PFS (perfect focus system) but I'm not quite happy with that. I don't know... we will have the test-drive for both next week. And actually they have different type of incubators. We'll see.

[LawfulBlade]

Hi. I think you're talking about a different scope than I've used, but I've directly used a Leica confocal for time-lapse imaging of cells in flux before. Our protocol involved keeping the cultures alive for months, so we'd only do 12 hour scans at a time, and give them a few days to recuperate in the standard incubator. The images it produced were spectacular, really top-notch stuff, however, we often had to have their technician in working on it, as we got a ton of software errors. Hope that helps. Let us know what you selected!

[ScienceShark]

Nikon is leading, but the final decision we'll take next month (when the money will arrive) )))

[ScienceShark]

Hello everyone!
Happy New Year!
For those who are still interested:
We bought Leica, because of really good software. There are many additional features like making map of area of interest and so on.