Metripol

Microscopes are found in every laboratory and science classroom in the country. Most people, having had encounters with microscopes in their youth, don’t give them a second thought. But microscopes have changed over the last few decades into a powerful tool with many uses.

Microscopes today are referred to as microscope systems. They do more than the older microscopes did and they do it better. The reason that they are called systems is that they consist of a number of components working together. Most of these systems still have some older components. The only component that is preserved in all of them is the objective lens. The objective is the lens adjacent to the object being examined. It gathers the reflected or transmitted light from the object. After that all kinds of things can happen.

Most modern systems have a binocular eyepiece. Made possible by the inexpensive production of precision prisms and mirrors, they relieve the observer from having to close one eye while looking through the other. The microscope system, however, has evolved a third eye. In trinocular microscopes a camera serves as the third eye. It is usually a high-quality digital still or video camera. The image can then be viewed on a computer screen. That image can be transmitted to any other computer, stored on digital media, and manipulated in various ways to obtain the desired information. This is what makes the modern microscope a system. It can acquire knowledge and make it immediately available to everyone.