This past summer, together with the industrious Yash Jawale (BS-MS 2013) at IISER Pune, we began assembling the Foldscope. The high-mag and low-mag lenses were our two options that we were playing around with. Having the first device was super-exciting. However getting a reasonable image took some learning. Frame-grabs from the videos are what we finally settled on. Since we have research grade microscopes in lab, it seemed only reasonable to test the outer limits of what we could do with the Foldscope and compare them to these finely machined massive pieces of lab equipment.

The result (Fig. 1), while exciting, clearly suggests a need to further improve the image quality and light intensity. The sample is actually fairly purple in hue when viewed in our standard “college microscope” in 40x (Durga Instruments Co. Ambala, DICA). And we are still working on getting better pictures. Any suggestions are welcome.

What one can see somewhat are the two purple-ish dots in the equitorial plane center and right. These are the bonafide WBC stained nuclei! But to do more, such as morphology, we’d have to get a bit better with the lens, camera-work and the light.

Yash tells me that the new version of the Foldscope being shipped come with better lenses. This might help matters a bit, but maybe somebody in the Prakash Lab might have some ideas.