Identifying and fixing in-plane positioning and stability issues on a microscope using machine-readable patterned position scales.

Investigations of the in-plane positioning capabilities of microscopes using machine-readable encoded patterned scales are presented. The scales have patterns that contain absolute position information, and adequate software accurately determines the in-plane position from the scale images captured by the microscope camera. This makes in-plane positioning experiments simple and fast. The scales and software used in this study are commercially available. We investigated different microscopy systems and found that positioning performance is a system issue that is not determined solely by stage performance. In some cases, our experiments revealed software or hardware glitches that limited the positioning performance, which we easily fixed. We have also shown that it is possible to investigate vibrations using this approach and quantify their impact on image blurring. This is, for example, useful for experimentally determining the settling time after a stage movement.