Digital Imaging Lab

The Penn Biology Digital Imaging Lab (DIL) in 14D Mudd is available to department faculty, post-docs, graduate students and staff to meet a range of imaging needs:

• scanning of photographs and 35mm slides and negatives
• scanning of phosphorescence and chemiluminescence plates
• professional-quality software to edit, analyze and print digital images or illustrations
• printing for publication or grant purposes
• archiving of work-related data and other files onto DVD-R, CD-R or CD-RW media

Your Biology lab or office key will grant you access to this facility. If your key does not work, contact Biology Facilities for assistance.

Click here to read detailed specifications of the lab, and click here to find specific instructions for the equipment you want to use. Some equipment may result in usage fees which labs will be billed for twice a year.

Technical specifications

Instructions

If you need assistance with the Storm 860 scanner, please contact Computing Support staff to make an appointment.
 

• Using the Epson Expression 1680 flatbed scanner
• How to write data onto DVD-R and CD-R discs
• How to scan 35mm slides with the Nikon Super CoolScan 5000ED
• How to print using the Epson Photo Stylus 1280 color printer
• How to perform optical character recognition (OCR) using OmniPage Pro X

Our primary setup includes the following hardware:

• Apple Power Macintosh G5 1.6 GHz with 768 MB RAM and DVD-R burner
• Zip 100 removable media drive
• VST "trimedia" flash memory card reader and floppy disk drive
• Epson Expression 1680 flatbed scanner
• Nikon Super CoolScan 5000ED 35 mm slide and negative scanner
• Epson Photo Stylus 1280 inkjet printer
• HP LaserJet 8100 laser printer
• Molecular Dynamics Storm 860 autofluorescence/chemiluminescence scanner

Our primary setup includes the following imaging software and utilities:

• Adobe Photoshop 7 and Photoshop Elements 2
• Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional
• Adobe InDesign 2
• Adobe Illustrator 10
• Apple Keynote (presentation software)
• Deneba Canvas 5, 6, 7, 9, and X
• Microsoft Office 2004 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• OmniPage Pro 6 (OCR)
• VRToolbox VRWorx (Quicktime VR authoring suite)
• TeXShop (LaTeX editor and rendering tool)
• Hamrick VueScan Professional
• Roxio Toast Titanium 6
• MacLink Plus 11 (format conversion utility)
• Molecular Dynamics ImageQuant and Microsoft Excel are included for data acquisition and analysis for the Storm 860

Costs

We charge research labs for printing to help recover some of the costs associated with supplies and maintenance:

• Epson Photo Stylus 1280: $0.25 per page
• HP LaserJet 5100tn: $0.10 per page

There are maintainance costs associated with use of the Storm 860. We ask that you sign any log books where requested.