Zeiss ATLAS 9000 Corneal Topographer

Although an advanced and well-capable corneal topographer, its expense and refractive limits have limited demand.

Overview

There’s a lot to love about a stand-alone topographer unit; it’s fits on the pretest table (next to everything else) without a giant monitor and doesn’t require an IT genius to use and understand. Unlike most other computerized topographer, the ATLAS series by Zeiss has always possessed an all-in-one computer and topographer– rather than the inverse of a topographer cone-head and a computer on a giant table sold as a set. Even if it’s still running Windows 7 (or embarrassingly XP for that matter), it an attractive concept having all your pretest instruments sit on one table side-by-side. And so for that reason alone, the 9000 gets our nod of approval and applause. But let’s say you don’t care that it’s compact, and you want the latest-greatest topography option around- should you look towards the ATLAS 9000? As per the usual, it depends. The 9000 has improved some from prior Zeiss models, and as far as topography is concerned, it’ll do that and more– but with a new price tag of $18,000-something, it does make you scratch your head some. Yes, its invisible placido ring illumination is better for patient comfort and yes SmartCapture picks the best of 15 images, and yes MasterFit2 is better than MasterFit1, and yes it has some new software bells and whistles, and yes it overall runs better and more accurately- but is that enough? Zeiss is now nudging elbows with new players in the corneal market that can analyze tear film break-up time and perform limbus-to-limbus coverage with wildly impressive 3D presentation and tell you what the patient had for breakfast. However the ATLAS 9000 makes sense to us, and it is indeed a topographer for modern times.