[Histonet] budget camera for DAB sections on an old olympus BH-2

[Bass, Caroline]

Hi Everyone,

I do a lot of DAB staining on relatively thick rat brain sections (40um). I have been using a really nice slide scanning system for publication quality images. Recently I acquired a really nice Olympus BH-2, it has great objectives pilfered from an old confocal microscope. I’m on the lookout for a used trinocular head so I can take pictures. We have two basic needs:

1) to provide a viewing screen so that more than one person can assess a section, going back and forth between 3-4 people becomes a pain.

2) I’d like to take mid-quality pictures for notebooks and to make decisions on which to image with more quality (so having my students send me pdfs of images). 

3) it would be fantastic if I could use some sort of wi-fi system to use with phones/tablets, etc. So we could easily share photos without a computer. 

4) cheap!

My thought is to go with any one of the super cheap cameras out there that have nice sharing features or buy a used camera that’s decent. I’d like to keep it under $500. I’ve seen used Zeiss color Axiocams, olympus DP70s, 10, 11, 12s, and then various infinity, spot, qimaging and coolsnap cameras. 

Any suggestions for keeping things inexpensive, but taking decent quality images thats good for archiving, sharing and generally assessing the tissue to decide which section to image for publications? What I don’t know is what it would cost to get any of these used cameras working, do I have to pay for extra cards (firewire, etc), controllers, and software?

Thanks!

Caroline Bass
Assistant Professor
University at Buffalo