We are pleased to announce the release of the first commercially available upgrade kit for the PUMA microscope – the Abbe condenser upgrade kit.
The kit provides everything you need to upgrade the standard Foundation scope to use the PUMA Abbe condenser system as described in the videos on the PUMA Microscope YouTube channel. This includes the long legs stand system and a starter pack of filters for the condenser’s IAD Fourier plane slot to allow for dark ground (dark field) microscopy and Schlieren phase contrast. Filter holders for dry and oil-immersion optics are provided. The kit makes use of the standard mirror illuminator that ships with the Foundation scope.
The PUMA Abbe condenser has a numerical aperture (NA) of approx. 0.92 dry and 1.14 when oiled. This allows use of high magnification high NA objectives such as the OptArc x40 and x100 oil plan achromats.
This condenser upgrade kit will be a pre-requisite for our next planned upgrade kit (the Köhler illuminator upgrade kit) – so watch out for that when it become available.
It has taken a long time to get this ready for sale because we have been updating the CAD models and testing them to ensure the system is of high quality and can stand the test of time prior to committing to a production run. See the free PDF manual for more detail.