Microscope Slides

Blank slides are for mounting your own fresh or wet samples and are consumed in volume. Prepared slides come with a fixed, stained specimen ready to view, ideal for consistent teaching demonstrations or when a fresh sample is not available.

Ground edges are smoothed for safer handling, reducing the risk of cuts from sharp glass corners. A frosted end adds a writable surface at one end of the slide for labelling samples directly, useful whenever you are tracking several specimens.

Standard slides are 1mm thick and pair with standard cover slips. Concave slides have a shallow well ground into the centre for viewing liquid samples like hanging drop cultures, which flat slides cannot hold.

Because blank slides are a consumable, buying in packs of 50 or more usually works out cheaper per slide than smaller packs, worthwhile for any lab or classroom running regular practical sessions.

Blank slides are priced per pack, usually 50 or more, and cost far less per slide than prepared slides, which are priced individually or as curriculum sets due to the specimen preparation involved. Browse this collection to compare current pricing.

Prices on this page currently start from R 19.00.

A blank slide is plain glass ready for you to mount your own sample. A prepared slide already has a specimen fixed, stained, and sealed under a cover slip, ready to view straight away.

Blank slides used for a simple wet mount can often be cleaned and reused, though slides with a fixed or stained sample are generally treated as single-use once the specimen has dried onto the glass.

The frosted end is a lightly etched section at one end of the slide that takes pencil or marker easily, letting you label the sample directly on the slide rather than relying on a separate list.

This depends on the syllabus you are teaching. Basic GCSE and beginner sets cover common introductory specimens, while histology sets focus specifically on human and animal tissue types for more advanced biology courses.