Abstract
The goal of confocal microscopy is to obtain better image quality than that achieved in conventional light microscopy by examining each point in an object plane in the absence of light scattered from neighboring points. In this respect confocal microscopy differs from conventional brightfield microscopy where the intent is to view an object under uniform field illumination. The detector in the disk-scanning confocal microscope of Petran, Hadravsky, Egger, & Galambos (1968), is the human eye, a highly sophisticated instrument that is simple to use. The eye is attractive as a detector in terms of its quantum efficiency, the number and size of detector elements, the high degree of parallelism, and the higher order processing that results in perception of an image. Any confocal microscope that projects points in the object plane coherently onto conjugate points in the image plane can employ this detector. If the scanning is rapid enough, a stable full-field image will be perceived. As a detector, however, the eye is less than perfect in reconstructing images if the scanning rate is too slow, or when the scanning is arranged so that all points in the object plane are sequentially projected back onto a single point in space.
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© 1990 Plenum Press, New York
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Art, J. (1990). Photon Detectors for Confocal Microscopy. In: Pawley, J.B. (eds) Handbook of Biological Confocal Microscopy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-7133-9_12
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