View SCN files in your browser
The whole slide Leica's SCN400 scanner saves, one or more scanned regions with a picture of the glass. Open one right here and zoom to its cells. Nothing leaves your device.
Or drop it anywhere on this page
What you'll see
Your slide opens whole, then sharpens tile by tile as you zoom in to its cells, read from the smaller copies the scanner keeps.
- The whole slide • Zoom from the glass to its cells
- Label and the glass • Images of their own
- Measure • Lengths in µm, with a scale bar
- Export • Save the view as PNG or the slide as OME-TIFF
About SCN
Leica's SCN400 slide scanner saves its scans as SCN, and labs and archives still hold many of them from pathology, research and teaching collections.
An SCN is a BigTIFF whose first page describes a collection in XML: a picture of the whole glass and each region that was scanned, each with its place on the slide, its pixel size and its smaller copies, the pages that hold them packed with JPEG in tiles.
Filepeek reads it in your browser, each tile only when it shows, from the copy that fits the zoom. Each region and the picture of the glass are images of their own, Measure gives lengths in µm, and Export saves the view as PNG or the region as an OME-TIFF as big as your device holds.
Leica SCN
.scn
Format
- MIME type
- application/octet-stream
- Made by
- Leica Biosystems, for its SCN400 scanner
Inside the file
- Built on
- BigTIFF
- Tiles
- JPEG
- Holds
- Scanned regions and the glass
- Metadata
- XML of the collection
Opens in every browser
Filepeek opens SCN in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. No browser shows it by itself.
- YouChromeOpens through Filepeek
- YouEdgeOpens through Filepeek
- YouFirefoxOpens through Filepeek
- YouSafariOpens through Filepeek
Apps that open SCN
- WindowsQuPath and Fiji with Bio-Formats, free
- MacQuPath and Fiji with Bio-Formats, free
- iPhone and iPadNo app built in opens it
- AndroidNo app built in opens it
Questions
How do I open an SCN file?
Drop it on this page or press Peek an SCN. The scan shows whole first, and its tiles sharpen as you zoom in.
Why does my slide show several images?
An SCN can hold more than one scanned region of the same glass, and a picture of the whole slide. Each is an image of its own under Images.
Can I measure on the slide?
Yes. Turn on Measure and drag across a cell or a region. The length shows in µm from the pixel size the file keeps.
Why won't other apps open it?
Photo apps read a TIFF whole, and an SCN's full size scan is far too big for that. Slide viewers read it a tile at a time, as Filepeek does.