One of Olympus' not well known product in the American market is the UH3 Scanning Acoustic Microscope (SAM). This state of the art, highly versatile microscope has many applications from non-destructive imaging to biomedical analysis, to pharmaceutical applications to name a few areas of current industrial interest.

The principle behind SAM is quite simple, and uses the basic physical laws of reflection. High frequency sound waves are mechanically produced by a piezoelectric crystal. A high voltage impulse spike starts the crystal vibrating at its preset resonant frequency emitting acoustical plane waves through a medium with a relatively high sound velocity such as sapphire. The waves are made to converge by a half-spherical lens at the bottom of the sapphire rod. The diameter of the lens is less than one millimeter and depends on the operating frequency. The lower the frequency, the larger is the diameter of the lens.