Photometrics Releases Evolve EM CCD


A few weeks ago Photometrics released a new EM-CCD camera tagged the Evolve.

After attending a webinar presentation on this camera I wanted to point out the major technological benefiets of this system. Time will tell how these additions impact the overall performance of the system, of course I’ll be posting my impressions here as soon as I have an opportunity to work with it.

  • Quant-View: This feature finally removes the need for users to back-calculate ADU’s to electrons. Normally the values seen on your screen in software programs are numbers generated in the conversion of millivolt values on the sensor into numeric values, with some conversion factor applied (for instance sensor / 4 = Value to image). This is normally controlled with Gain in the camera settings. What makes this a pain is when you want to figure out either how gain 1 compares to gain 3, or when you want to figure out how many electrons were actually collected. Using electrons collected you can determine how many photons were collected by the snesor. With this new feature from PM (Quant-View) you no longer have to make this conversion. The values present in the image equal the electrons measured in the ccd.
  • Rapid-Cal: This feature is used to quickly recalibrate the EM Register on the camera. The primary advantages to this system are the faster calibration (which will make it more likely for people to calibrate more frequently for additional accuracy in the gain register) and the addition of a physical shutter inside of the camera body. This shutter ensures all light to the camera is blocked during the calibration process. Standard microscope bodies do not allow for this, so this is a nice feature to have for the calibration process.
  • Background Event Reduction Technology: This feature basically runs a median filter on any pixels that show a single-pixel spurious charge. The user can specify settings for whether these pixels are corrected on the fly. There is a video on how this works at Photometrics’ website here.
  • Black-Lock & Top-Lock: This is basically an on-camera scaling tool. By setting a minimum and maxomum output value in the camera controls you can force image output to clip signal and noise to those values.
  • Vari-Bit: This is a new A/D converter in the camera that supports readout in 8,12,14 and 16bit ranges. This can be useful in matching the dynaic range of the image to the A/D.

In summary Photometrics has added on-camera processing and a physical shutter to an EM camera. There is a nice marriage of convienent features to this camera to be an incremental step forward technology. Time will tell how much of a performance gain over similar systems is achieved.


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