Meiji's microscopes and cameras are housed on the second floor of the new Laboratory complex and function as the Environmental Sciences teaching laboratory. The laboratory has 170 individual workstations, each backed with video and online computing capabilities. Students will learn microscopy from first principles using microscopes from Meiji Techno equipped with cameras from Lumenera making this the most advanced and largest light microscopy teaching facility in the UK. It is already attracting visitors from other universities from around the country as they start planning equivalent shared, central teaching facilities.
Investing in such a large amount of instrumentation to be purchased in one tranche was a big challenge for the staff of the Department. A teaching environment has special needs so it was not just the excellent optical performance of the microscopes and cameras that won the day for Meiji Techno. Meiji in conjunction with their servicing partners, Mazurek Optical Services, worked closely with staff to ensure all specifications outlined in the comprehensive tender documents were met. So the final decision was one comprising performance, price, delivery, installation, training and long term support through Meiji's unrivalled limited lifetime warranty.
To look now at the laboratory with the new batch of first year students hard at work, it is clear that the design and layout chosen by the team at Liverpool is complemented by the neat arrangements of the microscopes and camera/video systems. In putting the final microscope packages together, partners Meiji Techno and Mazurek made suggestions that were adopted to improve aspects of safe handling in use and storage by replacing dual power supplies with a single unit on each microscope. The choice of cool LED light sources were important too removing the potential of users accidentally handling hot surfaces while producing light intensity with lower power needs matching the environment design goals of the overall teaching facility comprising physics and chemistry laboratories as well as the core group from environmental sciences described here.
