Association for Biology Laboratory Education

DinoEye, Simple Image Analysis & Networking
 

Helene d’Entremont

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2011, Volume 32

Abstract

For those of you who like to capture images of live or prepared specimens, the DinoEye is a very practical, portable digital eyepiece that works like a digital camera hooked up to a microscope. Students in our departmental labs are occasionally asked to take pictures of some of the slides or specimens they are studying. Until recently, the biology department was using an eyepiece adaptor attached to a digital camera (would only fit an old Nikon camera), to take pictures. These then had to be uploaded individually to the instructor’s or students’ laptops for image analysis. One common complaint was that the camera settings were difficult to set up, as the field of view did not take up the entire screen if not “zoomed in”. This was particularly problematic when using calibration tools with stage micrometer images. i.e. Images were taken at the same magnification setting, but not “optically zoomed in” at the same setting. With the DinoEye, images can easily be projected, captured and quickly saved to a computer, without fussing with camera settings such as optical zoom.

Keywords:  image analysis

Dalhousie University (2010)