Fluorescence on Optiphot

Have questions about the equipment used for macro- or micro- photography? Post those questions in this forum.

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ChrisR
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Post by ChrisR »

Rubbery is right.
They're 18mm filters

Off to the Chromatec site, thanks.

Are there any instructions like "Allow to cool before reapplying power"?

There's 44 pages of bedtime reading: https://www.chroma.com/sites/default/fi ... ilters.pdf
Chris R

pbraub
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Post by pbraub »

The HBO Lamps need some time to stabilize after ignition (15-20 min), this is especially relevant if you want to take stacks.

Do not turn off immediately after ignition and do not re-ignite a hot lamp. Both shortens the lifespan.


The olympus BX-RFA manual also says
#To extend the mercury burner life, do not turn the mercury burner off for 15 minutes after ignition.
#The mercury burner cannot be reignited until the mercury vapor has cooled down and liquefied. Before re-igniting
a mercury burner, wait for about 10 minutes after the last time it was turned off.
Somewhere in an Zeiss manual i read that you should keep the burner on if you intended to use it again within the working day (this seems a bit over the top for me)

The lifespan of the HBO lamps is usually rated 200h (the Ushio Lamps recommended by Olympus give 300h of good light). After this, the lamp changes its spectrum and starts to flicker. I have used lamps more than double the hours and the instability in the light was the reason which forced me tho change the lamp.

During my doctoral thesis a lamp blew up on me. It went really bright (loud bang) and then really dark ;-) it blew out a chunk of the collector mirror and nicked the inner collector lens. So this is real. The hours were 400+unknown as some #&$!§$ reset the timer on the powersupply. It might well have been over 1000h - but no one will ever know.

Greenfields
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Joined: Thu Nov 25, 2010 10:54 am
Location: Nottinghamshire, England

Post by Greenfields »

ChrisR Asked:

What are the electrical requirements of a power supply for an HBO burner?
Do they need a slow voltage or current start?
You need a special power supply unit which will initially start the lamp with rapid 1600V DC Pulses, then when the mercury has evaporated and the arc is established the unit will switch over to supply about 24V at 4 A. In older Nikon units you need to hold in a button for 10 seconds: you can hear a buzzing sound, the arc strikes then release the button to switch over.

Units which contain a transformer are very heavy but modern switch-mode power supplies are much lighter.

Some aftermarket units made by LEP had a meter so that you could monitor the ageing of the lamp by the change in its operating voltage or current [I can't recall which].

Olympus switch-mode units come up on ebay quite often from £100 and upwards in the UK. - but beware. Sellers often say that the mains light comes on and imply that the unit works. That light means no more than mains power is reaching the neon lamp - not that the unit is serviceable.

In the UK at least Nikon units seem to come up less frequently. You need one with an output socket which matches your lamp's plug. Some lamps had two cables: one for the HT output of the power supply and one for the low voltage high current stabilised supply. Others had a single cable. The number of prongs vary depending on whether the lamphouse has a safety microswitch to cut off the power if the lamphouse is opened.

The connectors usually seem to be CPC-Series-1-socket-female-14-pin sockets, but that's much less helpful than it sounds because only some of the pins are used and I don't know whether there is any standard way of assigning the pins in HBO power units.

If you post a picture of your lamp house and of the cable plug someone here may be able to give you more specific help.

Examples:

Optiphot lamphouse and power supply for an inverted microscope with instructions:

https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/Manuals/N ... OT-TMD.pdf

Example on eBay with a different power unit:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/223313314361

Which seems to resemble the unit in these instructions

http://www.mvi-inc.com/wp-content/uploa ... C-SHG1.pdf
Feel free to edit my images.

ChrisR
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Post by ChrisR »

I could make a power supply, but development might explode a few bulbs, hmmm!

Thanks for those. It looks like, to begin with at least, I'll be using tungsten or LED, or flash, then.
There's always a chance I may come across a setup for a different make.
Chris R

ChrisR
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Posts: 8668
Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2009 3:58 am
Location: Near London, UK

Post by ChrisR »

I now have an untested "older":Image
Image

Split o/p, :( I may be able to gate that but later ones were combined, right?

It looks rather 70's inside. 741's in cans...
Chris R

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