The major demand for imaging light element specimens in the TEM is to achieve the appropriate contrast. This is particularly true in biomedical and also in polymer fields of application. The main reason for contrast being challenging is the correlation between the atomic number of the constituting elements and the scattering angle and thus the very low scattering absorption contrast achievable.

Different conventional methods or combinations of them can be used to overcome the problem. 1) Contrast is created chemically by staining with heavy elements. Disadvantages besides the high level of preparational efforts are the artificial unnatural view in general and the high potential of artifacts in particular. 2) Contrast is created physically using small objective apertures and/or long focal length objective lenses. Disadvantages are clearly increased alignment and cleaning efforts for small apertures and the complete loss of high frequency/high resolution information. Moreover, some elastic scattering is still required. 3) Contrast is created physically converting phase contrast into absorption contrast using the phase contrast transfer function of the microscope and high defocus values.