Using Drift Correction with the Gatan OneView Camera

While calibrating dose on the Gatan OneView camera attached to the EMC's JEOL JEL 1400plus electron microscope, we noticed that the accumulation of counts in any give image depended on whether or not the user had selected drift-correction.

The experimental conditions were simply to set the beam to cover the area of the OneView camera sensor with uniform illumination and record a series of images using increasing exposure times. We doubled the exposure time between images, starting with the shortest possible exposure for the full 4k x 4k sensor (so 40 ms, 80 ms, 160 ms, etc. up to 1.28 s). This was first performed with drift correction turned off, and then repeated with drift correction turned on, and the average number of counts in each image was calculated and plotted:

These tables clearly show that when drift correction is turned off, the mean counts in an image are a linear function of exposure time (which for the OneView is equivalent to frame number). However, when the drift correction option is used, that linear relationsuip breaks down between an exposure time of 320 ms and 640 ms (i.e., somewhere between 8 and 16 frames).