From my experience, those lasers are cheap because: (1) cheap lasers are not well characteriszed (you would like to check their spectrum: for instance, cheap green lasers that use frequency doubling crystals don't have a proper infrared filter, and I found lasers that are sold as 532nm that can emit more IR than actual green); (2) cheap lasers are not properly stabilized in terms of optical power (no thermal control, bad optical feedback). Appart from this, this induces other problems (like wandering modes, which means that temporal coherence can be much shorter - I am not an expert on this kind of microscopy techniques, but I guess temporal coherence is important. Is it?)

In any case... I suspect that since you are a scientist, some cheap tweaking (electronics, optical filters) may help you save a few (maybe a lot) of bucks.

Hello Alvaro,

Thank you for your detailed answer. STORM Microscopy uses high laser power (

Hello Peter,

Thanks for your answer aswell. I am aware, that the cheap laser will never lead to  the same image quality as using professional scientific lasers. Financing the optimal laser will be a matter of a few month. Since i am in the end phase of my master thesis i cannot wait this long. My personal goal was to establish dual color STORM in the course of the master project and now i am dissapointed that the funding did not work as planned. I am now thinking of a way of presenting some kind of dual color in my master thesis. 

Propably the approach with a cheap laser is not realistic and i will propably use an established STORM microscope in an other labratory. Thanks again for your help!

Hi Tim,

you might want to take a look at  'A Blueprint for Cost-Efficient Localization Microscopy'. Here we used a cheap show laser to do dSTORM on a very simple low cost microscope generating a typical resolution of about 70 nm. What limited the resolution in that case was the 1.3 NA Objective (no TIRF) and the sub optimal QE and Noise of the interline CCD.

So i can say that you can definitely use show lasers in super resolution. But as Alvaro and Peter mentioned, these cheap lasers are cheap for a reason (bad power stability, beam quality, control options, product lifetime...).

That's why i would say a scientific grade laser is worth the money. The Obis is not the only 532 nm laser out there, there might be some more cost efficient Products on the market.

Did STORM with $15 laser pointer (150 mW, good beam after removing all lenses, and I was lucky...), but I would not recommend it with AOTF control due to mechanical and beam stability issues.

Try DragonLasers for well characterised high power 532 TEM00. Those worked great for us! We used direct control, no AOTF..  $1000 or so ...

Good luck!