Plates and dishes for imaging

For best quality imaging, you want to use a 170 μm (0.17 mm) coverslip. This is roughly equivalent to a #1.5 coverslip. There are also plate and dish options which use a plastic polymer instead of a coverslip. When choosing a polymer bottom pay attention to the thickness of the polymer, since anything thicker than a coverslip will reduce the working distance of the objective and can prevent you from using high NA objectives. Also standard PS tissue culture plasticware can be imaged through but you will not have good performance and is really only acceptable if you just need low resolution images. The following are sources of imaging dishes and plates we are aware of.

35 mm Petri Dishes

Mat-Tek — Relatively inexpensive and good.
Cellvis (formerly In Vitro Scientific) — Relatively inexpensive and good, reported to be cheaper than Mat-Tek. Many people are happy with them for routine imaging.
Greiner Bio-One CELLView dish — Available as both single and divided into quadrants.
ibidi — Options for both ibidi polymer bottom or glass bottom (#1.5H, 170 µm +/- 5 µm). Many people like the ibidi treat surface as a coating for picky cells.
Wilco Wells — Glass bottom dishes.
WPI — Reported to have high build quality and be very flat.
Eppendorf

Chambered Coverglasses / Slides

Lab-Tek Chambered Coverglass and Lab-Tek II Chambered Coverglass (#1.5 coverslip)
ibidi — Has ibidi polymer bottom or glass bottom (#1.5H, 170 µm +/- 5 µm) options, including 18-well options on a single slide.
Cellvis (formerly In Vitro Scientific) — Relatively inexpensive and good, reported to be cheaper than Mat-Tek. Has 18-well options on a single slide, and also sells single-well 96-well format dishes.
Greiner Bio-One CELLview Slide — New product with coverslip bottom and detachable block.
Eppendorf — Note: the Eppendorf product is slightly larger than the Nunc Lab-Tek coverglasses, which means it will not fit in any of our OkoLab stage inserts sized for Lab-Tek. The dimensions might change in the future so double check the size before purchasing.

⚠️ NOTE: MatTek is popular for 35 mm dishes, but the Chambered Slides they sell are not able to be viewed through the bottom (they have a 1 mm thickness) and should not be used for live imaging. You must remove the wells and coverslip these slides.

Multi-well Plates

There are a large number of multi-well plates designed for imaging available that vary in cost, mostly determined by the material the bottom of the plate is made of. There are some important details to pay attention to when deciding on a plate to make sure that you will be able to capture the images needed for your experiments. In general you want a flat-bottom plate with black sides to help keep background fluorescence and light scattering minimized.

Glass bottom vs Polymer bottom — Glass bottom plates will give the best performance and should be used if you plan on using a 40x or higher magnification objective. For standard screening the polymer bottom plates can provide good performance at a lower cost, but pay attention to the thickness of the polymer. Some polymers can be more than 300 µm thick, which will limit the objectives that can be used due to working distance issues.
Height of plate skirt — Plates with a tall skirt can prevent you from focusing on the edge wells with some objectives. If you need to use a higher NA objective be sure to test your plate to make sure that you can access the edge wells. Several manufacturers have plates available with almost no skirt.

Greiner Bio-One — Offers 3 levels of plates: SensoPlate (glass), SCREENSTAR plates (COC), and µClear plates (thin PS).
Corning — Offers many levels of plates with various coatings.
ibidi
MatTek
Cellvis (formerly In Vitro Scientific)
Porvair Sciences — Makes glass bottom plates with 0.17 mm bottoms and +/- 15 µm flatness across the whole plate.
Thermo Scientific Nunc has both polymer bottom and glass bottom options.
The Vale lab recommends these plates from Brooks.

Specialty Products

Coylab makes an interesting gas-permeable plate with a fluoropolymer bottom that is very thin (10 µm) and low refractive index (1.34). It may have interesting applications beyond gas permeability, such as using water-dipping objectives for imaging.
Sarstedt has a Lumox product line (multi-well plates and petri dishes) with a gas-permeable film base that is 50 µm thick.

Many companies can provide a sample of the different dishes and plates. If you are unsure of what you need, this can be a useful way to test performance of the plates on your samples.

UCSF CALM Microscopy Wiki