Magnification and Resolution
What is magnification?
Magnification is the rate at which you increase or decrease the apparent size of an object you’re examining, relative to its true size. When viewing in a screen, your magnification level determines how much of the object you can see, and how closely you can see its details. This is an exchange of sorts - increasing the magnification to see more detail results in you seeing less of the overall object. The range of magnification a microscope offers varies depending on the model, but ours range from low-magnification observation ranges of several centimeters to high-magnification ranges of tens of microns.
What is resolution?
Technically speaking, resolution is the number of pixels within an image, and is sometimes defined as the width and height of the image. Pixels are the smallest unit of a picture on a screen; they appear as tiny dots or squares of a single color, and together they form the image. Every image is made of pixels. A high-resolution image has a large number of pixels, and a low-resolution image has a small number. High-resolution images are clearer and able to show more detail.
Why does resolution matter?
Problems can happen when the microscope’s camera displays images on the monitor. If the microscope camera has a high resolution, but the monitor has a low resolution, the entire image captured by the microscope cannot be displayed on the monitor. This results in some of the pixel information being lost because the monitor has fewer pixels to display with.
Let’s take a closer look at how resolution matters with an example. For our example, let’s consider a microscope equipped with a 2 million pixel camera that is displaying an image onto a general laptop computer.
In this picture, the blue square represents the image retrieved by the microscope camera. The camera resolution is 2 million pixels, or 1600 horizontally by 1200 vertically.
In this picture, the orange square represents the image displayed by a basic 15.6 inch laptop computer. Its resolution is 1.05 million pixels, or 1366 horizontally by 768 vertically. Although resolution varies based on the type of laptop, this is typical for a laptop of this size.
As you can see in the images above, the image retrieved by the microscope camera is much larger than the image that the laptop is capable of displaying. That causes a problem, as you can see in the image below.
In this picture, the orange square represents what is displayed on the laptop screen, while the blue represents the parts of the original microscope image that are not displayed.
The result? As you can see in this picture, the entire image captured by the microscope cannot be displayed. Because of this, sometimes it’s impossible to determine what was originally captured, or it’s only possible to display or measure a small part. For this reason, we recommend using a monitor that has a resolution similar to the microscope’s resolution. As technology advances, higher resolution monitors are becoming easily available.
Our measurement software, Leopard and MicroLaboLT, also has features to combat this issue. Both have a Fit function which automatically adjusts the display size of the microscope’s camera based on the resolution of the monitor used, and displays the entire image. Here’s an example of how it works.
In a normal display, the resolution of the camera is higher and the whole image is not displayed.
With the Fit function, you can see the entire image, and know it is a stamp of 100.
Even if you’re not using the Fit function, our user-friendly software saves microscope images with the original camera resolution of 2 million pixels. It’s simple to check with a glance which part of the entire image is currently displayed, and to easily move to another part of the image.
