In this video, we're going to begin our lesson on electron microscopes. And so recall from our previous lesson videos that electron microscopes, as their name implies, are going to use electrons instead of using light. These electron microscopes are much more powerful tools than the light microscopes themselves. This is because electron microscopes actually provide greater magnification. In fact, they can provide magnification up to 10,000,000 times. This means that they can make objects appear 10,000,000 times larger than the actual object is. This is in comparison to just the 1,000 times magnification provided in most standard light microscopes. Now electron microscopes, not only do they provide greater magnification, but they also provide greater resolution as well. In fact, electron microscopes can provide resolution up to about 0.3 nanometers, which is incredibly great resolution. This is in comparison to the 10 nanometer resolution provided even in a super resolution light microscope. So the light microscopes in general are not able to provide as high magnification or as great resolution as the electron microscopes are capable of providing.
Now these electron microscopes, because they are such powerful tools, they're really, really complex instruments, and it usually requires complex specimen preparation as well that ultimately limits the observation to only nonliving cells and objects. It's very difficult to be able to visualize living cells with electron microscopes because a lot of times the sample preparation will ultimately end up killing the cells. Now the electron micrographs or the images created by these electron microscopes, are usually going to be just black and white. But they can be falsely colored, in order to create images that have color in them. So the false color is usually done by specialized computers. If you take a look at this image down below, notice it's showing you a little map of the electron microscopes. And really, as we'll see moving forward, there are 2 main types of electron microscopes that we'll talk about. And those are the transmission electron microscope, or the TEM, as well as the scanning electron microscope or the SEM. We'll start off talking about the transmission electron microscope, microscope, and then later in a different video, we'll talk about the scanning electron microscope. So I'll see you all in our next video.