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Your selected HDTV will have its own menu system to adjust
color, brightness, contrast, backlight, gamma, etc.
The default settings of the camera itself (values which may differ a
bit from those shown here) are a good place to leave the camera
settings and from there you can tweak your TV settings.
Because specimens can have very bright elements (like
eosinophils in blood) as well as less bright elements in the blood
plasma (like fibrin), this huge variation in light intensity is a lot for
the pixels in a camera chip to handle on equal footing. While
phase contrast handles it all very well, darkfield mode does not.
When you are in darkfield mode, you should be using the darkfield
enhancing donut to darken the background field. Decreasing the
light of the microscope may help refine the image of red blood
cells, while increasing the light may enhance elements seen in the
plasma. Increasing the Exposure Compensation on the menu may
highlight plasma elements even more and with auto exposure
turned off you can vary the overall Gain and Exposure
Compensation as well but you would need to go back to Auto
Exposure when exiting darkfield mode as there would then be too
much light and the camera would wash out.
White Balance
When you press the White Balance button on the
menu, the camera will adjust the red and green values for ‘white’
depending on what the camera is looking at. Where the values
move will vary depending on the scene. Genereally White Balance
would be set while looking at a field of light in brightfield mode. If
you were in phase contrast mode, the values would be different.
The Red and Green values
of Red 23 and Blue 36 are very good
for phase contrast using the LED light of the CX43. Just a single
point up or down can change the image color slightly. Whether it
needs to be tweeked may depend on your monitor. Moving the
red or blue value a single point up or down with the mouse can be
difficult. The mouse scroll wheel moves the values at 3 point
increments. To arrive at the value you want, scrolling up from 0 or
down from 200 will often land you on the value you want.
Sharpness
setting from 20-150 can all look very good and
sharpen the image to your preference but where it should be
somewhat depends on your HDTV sharpness setting. With some
TVs the camera can be at 0 and the TV sharpness set higher, it
might be just the opposite for other TVs. Setting sharpness higher
can make the image appear very sharp and nice, but when
digitally zooming in, fractal patterns become evident and
decreasing sharpness will lessen that fractal effect.
The
Denoise
filter on the camera should not go above 9 to 12 for
live cell imaging. Set at 12 it gives a slight refinement to the
picture, above this and it starts affecting the real time movement
of blood particles too much. As the software massages the image
to refine it, the process slows down the real time movement that is
actually occurring. If that is not a concern, than a higher value
here will refine the image.
Saturation
is related to how deep color renders. 45 here is about
right, your HDTV will have a level for this level as well.
Gamma
adjusts the output to the
screen of the shading from white to
black. For all around scope use
using all modes of the condenser, 5
is typically a good place for it to be.
If your TV has a dark gamma to
begin with (some computer screens
have a dark gamma and can’t be
changed), bumping this down will
lighten the screen image, with some
monitors or HDTVs you will have to
increase it to 6.
Contrast
at 50 is often good and
you can tweak your HDTV contrast
setting as desired or vice versa.
Some HDTV/computer monitors will
not provide great contrast and
moving this camera contrast setting
much higher will be required,
possibly more so for darkfield.
