Help!! Need nonreflective black background!

[curiou5]

I'm a research scientist and I need a very black, very matte, very nonreflective background for some microscopy work that I do (I do microdissections of animal tissue). Right now I'm using the back of my mousepad. I also tried using the cardboardy material from a black binder, but surprisingly it's really shiny under bright light. Also tried printing a solid black sheet of paper from a laser printer, but it looks like crap, and it's not very black at all. Can any of you think of anything else that might work?

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Black contruction paper.
Black cloth

 

[LordMaul]

Cool! Pics?

 

[glen]

black velvet

 

[curiou5]

paper of any kind doesn't seem to work well at all... the individual fibers of paper are really smooth and reflect alot of light. i'll have to look into the cloth idea... but i think it might have the same issues that paper has.

Pics? Sure... but I don't think it's as gory as you might think. I work with pieces of tissue that are 1 cm long. Not very bloody, not very interesting to look at.

 

[curiou5]

bump for more suggestions

 

[Fausto]

Black felt?

Out of curiosity...what kind of stuff are you doing? I worked on a project once where I had to do microsurgery on a bunch of rats to ligate off some of the blood supply to their kidneys to simulate a renal failure model for preclinical drug development. Lots of fun to ligate off a vessel smaller than the thread you're using to do the ligation. I'm lucky I'm not blind now from all that.

Fausto

 

[Nefrodite]

big duh, black velvet

 

[AlwaysWong]

Why don't you just paint a piece of wood? You can sand your own texture too.

 

[curiou5]

yah black velvet seems like the best idea right now. i will give it a try.

I cut out mouse tracheas to grow the smooth muscle cells in there in tissue culture. I've actually been working on this project for 6 months now... I'm kinda starting from scratch to develop a novel in vitro model of mouse airway smooth muscle.

Yeah... spending hours on the dissecting scope is a bitch.... I better get out of this line of work pretty soon