The Leica TCS SPE and SPE2 are almost identical basic "personal" confocal microscopes mounted on DM2500 upright microscope stands. They are designed principally for scanning samples that have been fixed and mounted on slides but they can also be used to image living samples if they can be mounted using gaskets and imaged through coverslips (e.g. Drosophila pupae). Alternatively we have a set of water dipping lenses for use with samples that require open chambers. Incubation at 37°C can be done using either a Warner Instruments perfusion system or Okolab instrumentation designed for use with dipping lenses on upright microscopes. Please email lmcb-lm-help@ucl.ac.uk well in advance if you want to use CO₂ as a bottle of the right percentage will have to be supplied. It relies on a motorised dichroic mirror to switch between illumination conditions, which is too slow for very rapid processes (< 1 sec).

 Both machines have four lasers and a single photomultiplier tube (PMT) detector, so simultaneous acquisition of multiple channels is not possible. All multi-channel acquisition is done sequentially.

A galvanometer driven stage insert is used to change the focus when optically sectioning samples. The speed of this device means that XZY scans are possible in addition to the conventional XYZ scan and single colour 3D time series acquisitions can be quite fast.

The ACS objective lenses, which have been designed to correct for colour registration errors caused by chromatic aberration, do not have a flat field, so best results are achieved at zooms ≥1.6.