Traditional optical microscopes measure the intensity of the light absorbed and/or scattered by your sample. Often, however, samples contain small and subtle features that neither absorb nor scatter light particularly strongly, resulting in weak contrast.

By measuring how the sample bends the light (i.e. mapping its refraction), WARP technology opens the door to new measurement capabilities:

• Visualising smaller and more subtle features in samples
• Labelling features based on local composition and/or density
• Creating 3D maps of thickness and height

What’s more, WARP operates in full colour, giving even deeper insight into every sample.

Because WARP gives you a much more complete description of how light interacts with your sample, it also means you can replicate every other optical microscopy mode without any additional filters, condensers, or specialty illumination.

Currently, Z1 includes built-in options for visualising:

• Colour bright-field, perfect for larger and/or stained features.
• Phase contrast, for weakly-absorbing features, such as mammalian cells
• Differential interference contrast (DIC), for resolving fine structures, such as within e.g. zebrafish embryos
• WARP magnitude, when fine structure are also expected to demonstrate spectral dispersion

Every contrast mode is included in every WARP measurement, giving you complete flexibility whenever it’s needed – even after you’ve already finished the measurement!