Migrating to digital imaging from film
Since the invention of the microscope, most images were recorded on photographic film. For transmission electron images, Hamilton and Marchant recognized that most photographic films are “nearly perfect detectors, in that they record the input signal without appreciable loss and do not seriously add to the input noise”. Despite film's efficiency as an image recorder, microscopists complained about the long cycle time between image recording and completion of the final print. Quantitative image analysis of images recorded on film is also time-consuming and expensive because microdensitometers capable of producing high quality and high resolution scans of negatives are slow and expensive.Over the past few years several new technologies to record light and electron images have been commercialized. The oldest of these are video-rate cameras and TV-rate cameras built with charge coupled devices (CCDs). These are limited by small image size (512 × 478). Larger format digital cameras built using slow-scan CCD cameras have recently been applied to light and transmission electron microscopy. Digital scan generators and frame buffers have been added to scanning electron microscopes.