Nikon Eclipse Series Microscopes

Nikon Eclipse E200 Nikon Eclipse E200 with trinocular head

The Nikon Eclipse series of microscopes, produced starting in the late 1990's, is Nikon's entry into infinity corrected optics, which create a collimated beam inside the body of the microscope, until it encounters the 200 mm (for Nikon microscopes) focal length "tube lens".

There are many models of Eclipse, with the lowest being the E100 and E200, the student versions. The E100, at least, has the option of 20 W halogen or LED illumination. One nice feature, even with the E200, is that the sample stage is spring loaded up, so you may push it down to change objectives or slides and have it come back to the same focus position when released. Check out the Nikon Museum for more info on some of the models. It is less capable than its bigger brothers, but still produces very nice brightfield images, using a built-in 6 volt halogen lamp for diascopic observation. It turns out that the condensers for the Labophot/Optiphot series seem to work just fine in an Eclipse E200, which may translate into the higher series as well.

The unfortunate thing (depending on how you look at it) is that the Eclipse series uses objectives which conform to the M25 thread standard instead of RMS, and they are infinity conrrected, not finite conjugate lenses. This means that none of the old objectives will work on this, and vice versa!

Since it uses the CFi60 standard (infinity corrected) instead of the older CF system, it needs different eyepieces and objectives - of course they changed condensers a little, too. I have tried the Labophot/Optiphot condensers, and they seem to fit OK on the Eclipse E200. The eyepieces can be the older CF series, but Nikon touts the CFi eyepieces as being optimized for CFi objectives (this may be a marketing ploy, however). The objectives no longer use the standard RMS thread that Nikon had used forever, but rather M25 (25 mm) threads.

As shown above, there are both the standard binocular as well as trinocular versions of the observation head. As far as I know, the Eclipse observation heads have little slits cut into the circular dovetail. The Labophot/Optiphot observation heads will fit on an Eclipse, and it does work - but since it doesn't contain the tube lens, the objectives are no longer parfocal. In other words, with an Eclipse head, the objectives all focus near the same place, but with an Optiphot head, there is significant defocus between objectives. Even still, you would likely not get a good image at high magnification, since you are essentially using the infinity lens at a finite conjugate.

I investigated the lamp power supply, but have not yet disassembled the focus stage.


Besides the standard series, E100, E200, E400, E600, E800 and E1000, there are polarization optics versions (Pol.) of some of those, and motorized (M), as well as the TE2000 inverted, LV150 industrial, the 80i and Ci series, among others.



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