Laser Scanning Microscopy is a highly complex technology. This is where its enormous potential lies. We thought carefully about ways to make it easy for you to harness this potential – to make your workload “as light as a feather.”

Carl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe demonstrated a long time ago that user friendly products are only made possible by bringing together precision and intuition. Our new LSM software follows this principle.

Using modern programming and design tools, we have created the perfect combination of state of the art technology and intuitive user interface: ZEN. With ZEN you will be able to concentrate completely on your research. Discover a new era in Laser Scanning Microscopy.

One glance at the well-organized and elegantly minimal layout of ZEN will convince you. Color and brightness of input fields and buttons have been carefully adjusted to the typical light conditions of the laboratory.

The screen display has been optimized for the 30-inch widescreen format. The resulting additional space will prove to be especially useful during complex experiments in which many tool palettes and view windows are open. The screen is organized into three areas, following the typical workflow of your experiments.

Everything needed to control the microscope and to acquire images is located in the Left Tool Area on the left side of the screen. All tools are arranged from top to bottom following the logic of the operations in which they are used.

The Center Screen Area is the worktable for displaying the images and interacting with them. File management is found in the Right Tool Area. This part of the interface provides a permanent overview over all the acquired images

ZEN is extremely flexible and was developed so that functions can be adjusted individually – to meet the requirements of a particular user or a specific experiment.

The Pro-Basic concept for example is one of the key features that ZEN offers to enable you to focus on the essentials. We reduced the complexity of the imaging software to a minimum but you will never be without the full technical possibilities the system offers. You decide whether the basic functions of a tool suffice for a particular task or whether you need the complete functional spectrum.

In this way, the user interface is always as simple and clear as possible. You can take the complexity of the interface into your own hands, save almost all user interface adjustments as preferences and recall them with just two clicks of the mouse.

Thus the interface will adapt over time to your particular needs and habits. All saved settings can also be shared between users and systems – a feature tailored especially for multi-user environments.

ZEN offers completely new interactive features that have been conceived to change the way you work with the hardware. The Light Path Tool for example is the core feature of the system. It is used to adjust the settings of the scan head. This is ameliorated by adapting the color representation of the emitted light to the selected filters.

Then there is the Z-Stack Tool that enables you to easily navigate through an image stack and simultaneously control your microscope. Both features have been visually designed so that they are completely intuitive to use

Extensive usability testing has shown that ZEN is extremely fast to learn thanks to the user-friendly interface. After a particularly brief training phase you will complete experiments more effectively and in less time than ever before.

This is what we mean when we say Efficient Navigation. Due to its ease of use ZEN provides the added concentration to keep your eyes open for that special moment in which you encounter the new and unexpected and recognize it as scientific breakthrough.

Perfection is not an art – it is an attitude. And this attitude is one of the very few things that have not changed over the past 160 years at Carl Zeiss – we have advanced everything else. The company was founded on the guiding principle of providing superb technological resources to enable scientific achievement.

Then as now, our experts seek to collaborate with leading researchers, bringing technical expertise to deep scientific knowledge. This is how we create research instruments that are perfectly tailored to the requirements of those who use them.

The precision and performance of our devices are a direct result of our pursuit of technological perfection. Our microscopes have paved the way for many significant discoveries and scientific breakthroughs. Microscope systems made by Carl Zeiss continue to provide the basis for a better understanding of the process of life and the world around us.