About Optical Building Blocks Corporation

Optical Building Blocks Corporation (OBB) designs, produces and markets state-of-the-art, proprietary electro-optical components and instrumentation used in leading research institutions around the world. Today OBB offers three main product groups of equipment; Interconnectable "Optical Building Blocks", Microscope Accessories, and Bench-Top Instruments.

At Optical Building Blocks we pride ourselves on the technical content of our extensive web page. Our goal is to provide all the information our customers and distributors could possibly need so that they can fully understand the capabilities, specifications and configurations of our components and instruments. And this on-line content is continuously updated with new information, to better achieve that goal.
You shouldn’t have to be forced to talk to a sales person just to learn about a product you are interested in. Please visit us at www.obbcorp.com to see what’s new at Optical Building Blocks and get the latest product information.

Current OBB Product Line

OBB Interconnectable “Optical Building Blocks”:  Optical Building Blocks Corporation specializes in a complete line of interconnectable electro-optical components. These products are offered on a component basis, or they can be interconnected to create application specific electro-optical sub systems. The OBB component line consists of high intensity broadband arc lamp illuminators, tunable CW and pulsed illuminators from UV to NIR, nanosecond pulsed tunable lasers from 235 to 990 nm, monochromators, sample compartments, optical choppers, PMT housings and NIR detectors.

OEM electro-optical components and systems: In addition to the standard component product line, OBB designs and manufactures custom OEM components, sub-systems and even complete instruments for manufacturers of photonics based solutions including solar simulators, photovoltaic (PV) instruments, microscope Illuminators, fluorescence spectroscopy, fluorescence polarization, circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy, stopped-flow fluorescence and Ellipsometry.

OBB Microscope Accessories: OBB has an excellent line of specialty illuminators and PMT detectors for microscopy.

• ScopeLite 200 broadband illuminator: $3,800 broadband metal-halide microscope illuminator.
• DeltaRAM™ X millisecond switching tunable illuminator: Tunable millisecond switching galvanometer based monochromator illuminator for quantitative fluorescence live cell imaging.
• Tunable PowerArc™ micro-illuminator: Scanning monochromator illuminator that allows users to directly select any wavelength and bandpass that their microscopy experiment requires. 
• PMT Photometers: Detect low light levels from one, two or three different emission wavelengths simultaneously.

OBB Bench-Top Luminescence Instruments: OBB offers a complete line of compact integrated bench-top luminescence systems that include acquisition and analysis software. These instruments are so simple that they require no factory installation.

• Quattro™ luminescence spectrometer: New bench-top steady state fluorometer that also measures phosphorescence lifetimes from 4 µs to 300 ms, and acquires lifetime-based reaction kinetics. This new instrument offers many new unique experimental capabilities and also boasts the best sensitivity of any bench-top fluorometer.
• EasyLife™ family of time-resolved luminescence systems: There are three different filter-based EasyLife™ systems that measure luminescence lifetimes and lifetime-based reaction kinetics from 45 picoseconds to 300 milliseconds. The EasyLife™ X starts at only $9,995 and measures fluorescence lifetimes from 100 ps to 4 µs.

Optical Building Blocks History

Over 30 years ago Photon Technology International (PTI) was incorporated in Princeton New Jersey. PTI is a pioneer in the photonics industry that started off in those early years as a provider of quality electro-optical components. The phrase “Optical Building Blocks” was used extensively by PTI to describe their series of interconnectable optical components. Thousands of PTI components have been sold to photonics research labs around the globe, and they enjoy an excellent reputation for quality, performance and reliability.

Over the years PTI developed a complete line of modular fluorescence research instruments built from their Optical Building Blocks and complemented with a comprehensive fluorescence spectroscopy software platform. It is for these industry leading fluorescence and phosphorescence instruments that PTI is most well known for around the world.

In 2008 Optical Building Blocks Corporation (OBB) was founded as a separate corporate entity focused on the development and distribution of PTI’s optical components, branded exclusively as OBB products. As such OBB is able to focus on the photonics component marketplace including our OEM customers and still take full advantage of the quality, reliability and experience of our sister company. Today the Optical Building Blocks product line is ever expanding and growing. In addition to our Optical Components product group we have added a compact Bench-Top Instruments product group consisting of steady state and time-resolved fluorescence and phosphorescence systems as well as a Microscope Accessories product group consisting of specialty microscope illuminators and detectors.

OBB has a policy of continuous product development and reserves the right to amend part numbers, descriptions and specifications without prior notice.