The following comparison was written with diSPIM in mind, but the main points apply to all types of SPIM.

• Confocal has much more photobleaching/phototoxicity than SPIM (i.e. SPIM uses the excitation light much more efficiently) Low light dose is the main motivation for most SPIM users.
  • In general for X slices you need X times as much light for confocal as you do for SPIM.
  • Supplementary Video 2 of Wu et al. is a good demonstration; note how quickly the spinning disk kills the cells being imaged.
• Confocal has better Z resolution than single-view SPIM but worse than dual-view SPIM after registration/fusion. XY resolution is comparable.
• Spinning disk confocal is just a massively parallel confocal implementation so it's faster but has the some characteristics otherwise.
• diSPIM is comparable speed (per view) to to spinning disk confocal (assuming you increase the laser intensity to make up for the ~3% open area of the spinning disks).