Zeiss began their European tour today in Liverpool show casing their latest offerings in the field of high resolution microscopy. A sell out workshop heard about their solutions for higher sensitivity confocal imaging, structured illumination, apperture correlated and single molecule nanolocalisation microscopy (wow!)
There now seems to be a Zeiss solution for all your microscopy needs. A lot of effort has been put into this and it's looks pretty good, even with "real life" samples! Oh yes, I took some slides along - well it's rude not to, eh?
So what's on offer? The new generation confocals, LSM710 has had pretty good things said about it, much improved noise:signal giving improved sensitivity. Now it seems to have grown up further with the addition of cooled PMTs and new GaAsP detectors for further sensitivity. There may be concerns regarding the longevity of these detectors, but they may well be the future as they are sensitive enough to enable single photon detection by all accounts. There certainly was a great deal of interest in their demonstrations. 
Besides the 780 there was a great demo of the LSM700, the little brother of the 710 (left hand image acquired on the LSM700 of HeLa cells stained for DNA [blue], Golgi protein [red] and a tyrosine kinase receptor [green]). Functional and very effective I thought. A good solution for 'basic' confocal needs (if there are basic confocal needs!). Other optical imaging solutions included Zeiss' spinning disc with FRAP module and the VivaTome (right hand image, colours as above, z-stack was acquired and a max intensity projection was generated in ImageJ). A clever amalgamation of spinning disc, wide field and image subtraction. It essentially allows high speed optical imaging but with no lasers. I often have reservations about this type of thing as they often need bright samples, which aren't always the best to visualise, especially in living cells. Having said that it coped with my samples adequately!
Finally, nanolocalisation microscopy: the commercialisation of a number of super resolution solutions from the past five years or so. Zeiss have launched ELYRA to perform structured illumination, PALM and STORM. They only had a workstation here unfortunately but watch this space I guess!
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