Friday, October 17, 2025
Possible Imaging Solution With Cellphone Screen
I laboriously peeled off a large sheet of polarised film from an old LCD, crossed the polarisers under the microscope with a random resin sprinkle between, and ... it didn't help worth a damn.
Then I used my cellphone as a polarised light source. That didn't help with polarised viewing but I noticed I could see the grid pattern of the screen. This is because the little dots of resin act like lenses, and bring the LCD pixels, which are out of the depth of field, back into focus. This image is approximately 1mm wide:
Of course, I have to take the picture with the crappy imager because my cellphone is under the microscope, but we can see a number of little grids where the resin dots are. The smallest seems to be around 50μm, but as I change the focus on the microscope, different sized dots come in and out of view as their intrinsic focal length is different depending on the diameter and thickness of the dot:
The smallest dots visible seem to be in the order of 50μm. I'll print more accurate structures, find another cellphone with a decent resolution screen, and check back later.
