I am looking for a microscope slide scanner for scanning tissue slides at several magnifications, thanks!
Hi Mariana, due to more than ten years of development of slide scanners, the recent scanners are all good and reliable to use. The choice depends mainly on the intended usage of these systems (pathology mass productions of slides and their daily scanning, or selected slide scanning for seminars or education purposes). It is important that your slide scanner should allow scanning with various magnification lenses (at least 20x and 40 x) with the easy selection the required objective lens with revolving nosepiece.
In my lab, I am using the Olympus (VS120-5 Slide Scanning System from Olympus) system that can automatically scan up to 5 preloaded slides in series. For high-production labs, there are also high capacity scanners for up to 120 slides or more to be preloaded for overnight or days-lasting automatic scanning.
Another criterion may be the availability of initial assistance and after-guarantee service of the manufacturer in your country.
Some users value the High Throughput of scanners the others the versatility of scanners that can be used at various magnifications in a bright field as well as fluorescence illuminations.
International Scanner Contests are performed every 2 years. Here is a link to one of them: https://scanner-contest.charite.de/en/results/2nd_international_sacnner_contest/high_throughput/
Dimitri
My Institute adquire the AxioScanZ.1 last year and it is an amazing piece of equipment. It has up to x4 x10 x20 and x40 objetives, 100 slides capacity, posibility of adquire Z-stack, automatic detection of tissue, reading a bar code in the label, etc. etc. It also does a very good job with fluorescent slides. It has LED (Zeiss Colibri Ilumination) and also conventional arc lamps and indenpent 6 position excitation and emision wheels.
We had also the opurtinity to try one scanner from Hamamatsu Photonincs. Also very nice and the same quality as the Zeiss, (if you do not need fluorescence) and I believe that more affordable.
