9/11/96


Dear Colleages:

I will appreciate it very much if anyone of you could tell me whether there

are photo scanners on the market that can be used to scan EM negatives into

the computer? I was told by a person from an image processing company that it

is possible to do this by using a transparency device. But I need to know if

there are people who are actually using those products for this purpose. I am

also interested in knowing the softwares, and printers that use photographic

paper. I do know there have been similar products that can be used for light

microscopy, e.g.,for flurescence microscopy, where the resolution of the

image is not a big concern. I do not know whether they can be used for

electron microscopy.

Thanks.

Yuhui Xu,MD,PhD

DFCI Core EM Facility

Harvard Medical School

Yuhui=Xu%RES%DFCI@EYE.DFCI.HARVARD.EDU


I scan my negatives on a LaCie Silverscanner III fitted with an Epsom

Transparency Adapter. With a good digital printer the results are closing in on

photographic quality .

Kate Connolly

Katherine.S.Connolly@Dartmouth.EDU


Xuhui,

The combinations of equipment used for digital processing of EM negatives

will vary greatly from lab to lab. We have obtained excellent results

with the following combination:

1. Scan the EM negatives with a Leafscan 45 scanner (Leaf Systems, Inc.,

250 Turnpike Rd, Southboro, MA 01772; (508) 460-8300 -- however I think

they were bought out by some parent company). This can give very high

resolution (with consequent large files), taken up directly in Adobe

Photoshop on a Power Mac 8500. We learned about the Leafscan 45 from

Martin Muller's lab in Zurich.

2. Work with the EM files on the Mac with Adobe Photoshop 3.0 (crop,

brightness, contrast, size, resolution, grouping, labeling, and so forth

to infinity).

3. When the micrograph is exactly as you want it, print it from the

Macintosh on a Kodak XLS 8600 PS Printer. The results are glossy prints

that can rival anything you could do in the darkroom. The printer can

print B&W or color with very good quality. The "printing paper", however,

is quite expensive.

A. Kent Christensen

Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology

University of Michigan Medical School

<akc@umich.edu>


For photographic quality of a digital image, the only way to go for output is

the Fujix Pictrograph 3000 digital printer (~$25K). With a top notch electronic

image, you'dswear it was a photo.

Walt Bobrowski

Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Research

bobroww@aa.wl.com


We have Microtek scanners:

A 45 T for negatives up to 4x5 inches, 30 bit color or B&W

A Scanmaker III for refection scanning; 36 bit color or B&W

a 35 t for fast scanning of 35 mmm size transparencies

We scan in the images so they are at least one megabyte (say 1024x1024).

We process the digital images in Photoshop 3.0 on a 100 mHz Pentium with

28 Mb of RAM and a 1.6 Gb disk.

For advanced enhancement we use a PiXision workstation.

But most of our images are now recorded digitally from the start. We

archive them on CD ROM.

For page makeup we mostly use CorelDraw.

For output we use a 600 DPI HP Laserjet for draft quality and a Tektronix

440 dye sublimation printer for photorealistic output. It does excellent

monochrome and briliant color, Cost AU$3.00 a page for mon o and AU$5.00

for color.

The system has been very well received by our users. The final result is

very professional and takes much less skill than conventional photography.

Mel Dickson.

m.dickson@unsw.edu.au


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