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CCD detectors have already begun to be routinely used in a number of important biological applications such as tomography of cellular organelles (reviewed by Baumeister, 1999), where the resolution requirements are relatively modest. However, in most high- resolution microscopic applications, especially where the goal of the microscopy is to obtain structural information at near-atomic resolution, photographic film has continued to remain the medium of choice. With the increasing interest and demand for high-throughput structure determination of important macromolecular assemblies, it is clearly important to have tools for electronic data collection that bypass the slow and tedious process of processing images recorded on photographic film.

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During the past decade charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors have increasingly become the preferred choice of medium for recording data in the electron microscope. The CCD detector itself can be likened to a new type of television camera with superior properties, which makes it an ideal detector for recording very low exposure images. The success of CCD detectors for electron microscopy, however, also relies on a number of other factors, which include its fast response, low noise electronics, the ease of interfacing them to the electron microscope, and the improvements in computing that have made possible the storage and processing of large images.

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Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work. This pertains to all the authors of the piece, their spouses or partners.

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In this review, we present an analysis of the potential of CCD-based detectors to fully replace photographic film for high-resolution electron crystallographic applications.