At the heart of Panasonic's camera -- and the reason Buehler selected it -- is a 900,000-pixel CCD chip that gives 560 horizontal lines of resolution and a signal-to-noise ratio of 54 dB, according to Alan Woodman, product manager for the Mars system. This gave him the option to upgrade resolution for the Mars system from a 380,000-pixel camera, while controlling overall system costs. "Panasonic offers the highest-resolution color single-chip real-time video camera that I found," he said.
Another drawing card was the size of Panasonic's camera. Its head is about the size of a tube of lipstick, and it can be connected directly to most microscopes. The camera's processing electronics are housed in a small box at the end of a 6-foot cable and may be placed where it doesn't intrude on analysts' work space.
Although uses for the Mars system extend beyond microscopy, it was designed with microscope applications in mind. "Calibration is usually a one-time procedure for microscope applications if the microscope has fixed magnification interchangeable objectives," Woodman said. "But with any image file that can be calibrated on [the dimensions of] a single item within it, you can then perform a wide variety of measurements on anything in the image.