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

Spinning disk confocal (SDCM) is just a massively parallel confocal implementation so it's faster but otherwise has the some characteristics as laser scanning confocal.

• Light dose: 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.
  • A rule of thumb is that you need X times as much light for confocal as you do for SPIM where X is the number of slices in your stack.
  • Supplementary Video 2 of Wu et al. is a good comparison of imaging with diSPIM and SDCM; note how quickly the SDCM kills the cells being imaged.
• Z resolution: diSPIM after registration/fusion has best Z-resolution. Next best is confocal, which in turn has better Z resolution than single-view SPIM.
  • Using Bessel beams to create the sheet can improve Z-resolution for single-view SPIM, but won't meaningfully change dual view resolution after registration/fusion.
• XY resolution: confocal and SPIM are comparable.
• Speed: SPIM (per view) and SDCM have comparable speed (assuming SDCM has higher laser intensity to make up for the ~3% open area of the spinning disks).
  • Camera readout speed bounds the maximum achievable frame rate. For example, 512 pixels high ROI is 2.5 ms readout time for sCMOS. Allowing 2.5 ms illumination time results in 5 ms total per image or 200 frames per second.