Seeing 'floaters' in my eye using Olympus CX31 but not my Leitz or Micromaster scopes

Hardware
1

When viewing at high power through my Olympus 100x it seems I can see ‘floaters’ in my eyeball reflecting back off the eye piece. My other two brands of microscope don’t do this. It is weird and annoying.

Anyone else seen this?

2

You (or anyone) see your floaters more the more spatially coherent the illumination is. With lower spatial coherence the floaters get less visible. With practically incoherent illumination the floaters are near invisible.
So this suggests that your scope that shows the floaters has a NA of illumination that is significantly smaller than the NA of the objective. The other ‘brands’ that do not show the floaters will have a greater match between the NAs. This mismatch can usually be fixed with appropriate adjustments of the illumination system to match the NA of the objective. For more detailed information about NA and other microscope theory, see the various videos on my YouTube channel (as well as other resources). For example, see this:

All the best,

PJT

3

Thanks so much, I will study the material and see if I can make the floaters diminish, they are bothersome. I will report back!