Localization-based super-resolution microscopy with an sCMOS camera Part II: Experimental methodology for comparing sCMOS with EMCCD cameras

Nowadays, there is a hot debate among industry and academic researchers that whether the newly developed scientific-grade Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (sCMOS) cameras could become the image sensors of choice in localization-based super-resolution microscopy. To help researchers find answers to this question, here we reported an experimental methodology for quantitatively comparing the performance of low-light cameras in single molecule detection (characterized via image SNR) and localization (via localization accuracy). We found that a newly launched sCMOS camera can present superior imaging performance than a popular Electron Multiplying Charge Coupled Device (EMCCD) camera in a signal range (15-12000 photon/pixel) more than enough for typical localization-based super-resolution microscopy. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America