Dear David,

Have you tried Micromanager? You can find it here: https://www.micro-manager.org/

It is a free software based on Imagej for the management of microscopes, and scientific cameras in particular. Setting up the hardware configuration  is not particularly intuitive, but once you get your camera set up right is one of the best acquisition softwares around, and it supports time lapse acquisitions.

Hope you like it

I use photoshop bridge instead of imagej. 

Paolo and Jamie, Thank you both for your suggestions. I'll look into both approaches and post what I find out here.

For anyone who may be following this question. Here's the update on what we have found in trying to get the image capture running.

1. Adobe Bridge. Given the antiquity of the computer system we're (Mac G4 and OSX.4) and the camera (QImaging Retiga 1300 RGB), and the version of Photoshop we have on that computer, the Adobe Bridge option wasn't an option. However, that approach might work for that camera with a newer computer system and newer version of photoshop. 

2. Micromanager looks like it could be an extremely useful tool-just not for this particular camera and computer system configuration. I downloaded and installed Micromanager for MacOS, with no problem. I tried several different micromanager releases and found that the latest micromanager release didn't run on our old G4, although older versions of micromanager seemed to work just fine.  However, I wasn't able to get the Retiga running with it. I don't think the QImage camera drivers included our old Retiga. I tried several versions of micromanager and got the same result.

3. At this point I simply accepted that we'll just use the Retiga camera for capturing single RGB images using Qcapture suite v2.66 of tissue with histological stains (H&E, etc) but not for timelapse types of imaging.

4. We still need to do basic timelapse acquisition for analysis of cell migration so... I ordered a cheap microscope camera (Motic 1SP 1.3 megapixel [1280x1024 pixels]. USB 2.0 connection. About $350, available from lots of vendors. RGB camera with, theoretically, a monochrome mode). This camera will do episodic, time lapse imaging and is fine for brightfield or phase contrast imaging where there is abundant light, but most likely would not be useful for fluorescence applications. We're running this camera on a Dell Optiplex 3070 (Windows 7, 64 bit system). We're currently running it using the MoticImage software that it came with.

   The Motic software provides great motivation to get the camera running via Micromanager. The Motic software is a pain, with a variety of defaults that pretty much guarantee a lousy image until you hunt the all of the defaults down and turn them off so that everything is user controlled. As I said above, it will do episodic timelapse image capture, but I find the MoticImage software to be really obnoxious and user hostile- sort of like the people who work in the parking and purchasing offices at most universities- but it can be forced to capture the images as a sequence of .tif files with timestamps. 

    Being inspired by the Motic software, I downloaded Micromanager (the latest version), which installed and runs on the 64-bit Windows 7 system with no problems. I have not yet been able to get the camera to communicate with Micromanager, although the latest version should support all Motic cameras. I think the difficulty here is that I simply haven't got the drivers installed properly for Micromanager to use them. I'll keep working on it.

   Thanks to both Paolo and Jamie for their help. If I manage to get past my own ignorance of Windows program organization and get the Motic camera running via Micromanager. I'll post the solution here.

Dear David,

Be aware that most qimaging cameras are based on the photometrics pvcam drivers, so you can try to set up micromanager on your macbook for pvcam and see if the retiga works. Since the retiga 1300 is a firewire camera, you can even think about buying a firewire pci card for your windows pc, and use the retiga there, it should not be too expensive.

If it can be useful, the procedure for selecting the camera in micromanager is clicking tools->hardware configuration wizard, from there create a new configuration, and then select from the list on the bottom of the windows your camera maker and model. As said, if qcam doesn't work, try the pvcam module. You can then click next in all the following pages, and finally save your new hardware configuration.

As for the Motic software, i know, i have been there before, your metaphore with parking officiers is spot on!

Sadly i never used a Motic camera with micromanager, so i can not help you there, but a good really cheap alternative if you don't need particular light sensitivity and you are ok with a RGB sensor is using a cheap webcam. Just put it in front of an eyepiece of your microscope, and it will do the trick. It works well in micromanager, using the "opencvgrabber" module.

There are even very cheap microscope mounts for iphones on the market, and i am quite sure there is some timelapse app on the apple store.

Hope this can help, let us know!

Paolo, Thank you, again. I will try out the pvcam drivers and report back here.

Anyone who may still be interested: We were able to get a Retiga 1300B to run on a Windows XP computer with umanager (https://www.micro-manager.org/) using the QCAM configuration file (https://micro-manager.org/wiki/QCam) and the Q-imaging QCAM  2.0.13.1 driver (http://www.qimaging.com/support/software/#camera).

I'm trying to get micromanager to work with an older Moticam 2000 (2.0M pixel, USB 2.0) and came across this thread. The newest version of Micromanager doesn't recognize the camera. Motic has a Micromanager driver download, but My computer says the executables are damaged and can't be opened. Maybe others on this thread (especially David Skerry) eventually got this to work?

The bad news is that we got so frustrated trying to get everything to work together properly through FIJI/Image J that we gave up. We did put a moticam camera onto a little inverted microscope using the Moticam software (Installed on a Windows10 PC if I remember correctly). The procedure to get a useful image was more complex than you would hope, but it did work for routine documentation purposes, but nothing I'd be willing to use for publication. This was now a number of years ago. Sorry I can't be of more help.