Electronic Zoom Software

The Electronic Zoom option is a software module that allows the user to magnify the confocal field of view. This is not digital zoom, which artificially enhances the image, resulting in the loss of surrounding pixels plus decreased resolution. Nor is it optical zoom, which uses movement of lens elements to achieve various fields of view.

Instead, when the Electronic Zoom function on the VivaScope^® is activated, two changes to the scanning behavior are made. First, the scan angle of the slow-scan element is reduced with no change to the frame rate, thereby scanning a smaller field in one axis. Second, due to the high NA of the Lucid StableView^™ objective lens, the VivaScope has greater lateral resolution than is actually used during normal scanning. Combined with the bandwidth capabilities of the detector, this makes it possible to increase sampling of a smaller field on the fast-scan axis, with no loss of resolution. The result is a magnified field with full resolution. Electronic Zoom has magnification of ~1.7x, with resulting field of view ~300 μm.

All VivaScope capabilities are fully functional while in Zoom mode. It is possible to collect VivaStacks^®, VivaBlocks^®, and Video Captures while in the zoomed field of view, in addition to standard single-frame captures.