PANNORAMIC Confocal uses innovative structured illumination confocal imaging to overcome the limitations of spinning pinhole-disc techniques. This delivers the highest light efficiency with minimal bleaching and fastest scanning speed. Colocalized imaging is available with both fluorescent and brightfield illumination. Also, SW DDIC (Digital Differential Interference Contrast) is used to ensure low-contrast brightfield visualization.

Technologies to increase scanning speed include darkfield and fluorescent preview, a Lumencor LED light engine for highest possible illumination, a scientific SCMOS camera combining high sensitivity and low noise to ensure short exposure times as well as an automated water immersion system for high NA objective. These solutions ensure a scanning speed up to 20 times faster than scanners using the spinning disc technology.

The structured illumination technology ensures minimum bleaching by collecting every usable light from the sample. Unnecessary sample illumination is guaranteed by hardware light triggering and reducible light intensity preserves the sensitive samples. The high-brightness confocal mode makes possible to detect weak signals without increasing the excitation light intensity.

Compared to competitive technologies (laser scanning confocal and spinning disc), PANNORAMIC Confocal offers an unbeatable advantage in running costs: while competitive texhnologies use expensive lasers with low lifetime (1-2,000 hours), Confocal’s LED light engine has a lifetime of over 15,000 hours.

Last but not least, Confocal offers multiple image export options (ROI, grayscale/color, multichannel) as well as lossless export to third-party 3D applications.