If my setup is going to have a lot of vignetting, is it still worth it?
A. Yes…and here’s why: Today’s digital cameras can have an extremely high pixel count for the price. Even if the image you end up with has vignetting, the portion of the picture that contains the microscope’s image is going to be so chock-full-of-pixels that you can still get a very high resolution picture. If you don’t want the darkness around the edge, you can crop it out with an inexpensive image processing program (e.g., Microsoft Picture It!) and still have plenty of resolution to view or print a highly detailed picture. Now, with that said, sometimes people will want to upgrade their camera to get more resolution and will get disappointing results. For example, let’s say you have a 4 mega pixel camera and you decide to upgrade to a 5 mega pixel. However the new camera’s higher resolution is obtained by increasing the physical size of the detector by 25%. You may not benefit from the increased detector resolution if the actual exposed area is proportionally smaller (assuming no
