Discovering DIC Microscopy

Hi, I’m Stefaan, and I’m an Optical Engineer at Edmund Optics, and today I’ll be showing you our DIC microscope which we are demonstrating at Photonics West here. This microscope is Differential Interference Contrast and is based on the interference of two differently polarized beams in the sample. It’s an ideal technique to analyze thin film samples and relatively transparent samples which are difficult to image with other techniques. Using our stock products, we built the microscope and it can be used also to adjust your contrast. So, we can move the prism inside which is essential to changing the contrast which you can see on the image up here. By moving the prism, we can change the features you see in the image and it can be used to analyze your samples, such as optical thin films, but also biological samples. In this case, you’re seeing a fingerprint on top of a resolution target. This entire microscope was built with stock catalog products and this demonstrates that our catalog provides you with the optics you need to achieve what you want in your projects. This DIC microscope was actually built by one of our product engineers, and it was designed in response to one of our needs in our optical lab. We needed a DIC microscope to analyze our optical coatings, and we turned to one of our engineers to build one for us instead of going for a commercial product. We use our stock products to do that, and it results in a much more flexible set-up, and it shows that we have the design expertise necessary to help you with your projects and that we have the stock optics you need for your applications. A commercial DIC microscope costs anywhere from thirty to forty thousand dollars, and this microscope, designed with our stock products, is considerably less expensive. For more information on this microscope or on any of our other products, please visit us online at www.edmundoptics.com.