How to choose a camera for telepathology?
The choice of camera is important for quality results in telepathology. Not many CCD cameras are capable of capturing the fine detail at the low power magnification. A critical test of any microscopy camera is to compare image quality and field of view when using the low-magnification objectives. The problem comes from the relation between the objectives’ resolving power, which is set by numerical aperture (NA), and the limit to resolution set by the camera’s CCD element size. This problem cannot be overcome by the use of magnifying lenses in the microscope trinocular because the field of view then becomes too small to be useful and may no longer be flat. For general use in telepathology, a digital camera having at least a million [<10micron] square CCD elements is required. This in turn imposes a limit on speed and interactivity since such cameras readout more slowly than the more familiar analog cameras. However, they are definitely worth it in terms of image quality.
