Andor Launches Neo Camera with Breakthrough sCMOS Technology

The Neo camera platform from Andor Technology is based on next-generation scientific CMOS (sCMOS) technology. Its ability to simultaneously offer ultra-low noise, extremely fast frame rates, wide dynamic range, high resolution and a large field of view allows it to overcome the performance trade-offs associated with traditional scientific CCD detectors.

Neo achieves an unprecedented 1 electron read noise while reading out 5.5 megapixels at 30 frames/sec. Furthermore, the camera can be pushed to 100 full frames/sec, even faster with regions of interest, while still maintaining 1.4 electron noise. Neo exclusively offers deep vacuum cooling down to -40°C, critical to maintain the low noise advantage and a minimal pixel blemish specification across all exposure conditions. The vacuum architecture also enables a single window design for maximum photon throughput. The innovative dual amplifier architecture enables Neo to achieve a wide dynamic range of 30,000:1 - with 16-bit digitization available at all frame rates - while still offering a relatively small 6.5 m pixel size that is ideal for fluorescence microscopy techniques. Neo offers unparalleled FPGA intelligence for superior image quality and quantitative stability, coupled with a 4GB on-head image memory to facilitate faster frame rate performance.

Dr Colin Coates, Imaging Product Manager within Andor Technology, said; "Neo sCMOS has been designed from the ground up specifically to realize the full potential of this radical new sensor technology. Over recent months, we have received extremely favourable feedback from user performance evaluations of our ‘early adopter’ beta units, highlighting that the technology is primed to become a highly enabling gold standard across a wide breadth of application areas within life and physical sciences, academia and industry.”

Dr Lars Hufnagel, from the Developmental Biology Unit at EMBL Heidelberg, evaluated an Andor sCMOS camera on his lab’s Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy (SPIM) set-up, commenting; “Without pushing it to the limit, we took 131 planes in 5.5 megapixel mode of the drosophila embryo in a timescale that is practically instantaneous compared to the morphogenic processes, out-performing by far everything we have tried before.”