Microscope Slides

Plain or frosted, polished edges or ground edges, beveled corners or not and prepared or blank. Microscope slides are the essential required accessory that you must have in order to use a compound biological microscope. Slides are typically made of soda lime glass or borosilicate glass but the trait that they share in common is that a good quality slide will be optically "flat". What this means is that the thickness will not vary across the width and breadth of the slide so that it will be visually detected. The so-called standard slide is 75 mm x 25 mm and nominally 1 mm thick. These dimensions will be maintained within a micron or two and will never cause any distortion in the image of the sample or cause the microscope objectives to lose parfocality. High quality prepared slides will also adhere to these same dimensions. There are specialty slides such as those used in geology and petrography, but the issues remain the same in terms of getting quality samples. The only time flatness is not an issue is when the various forms of depression slides are used to make suspension preparations.