It is well known that field emission produces a significantly brighter probe than conventional heated-filament methods. Heretofore, however, the only commercially available field emission SEM exploited this brightness advantage to permit TV rate scanning at all magnifications; the viewing of large, bright, “flicker free” and “stripe-free” images; and lownoise photography at short exposure times. A resolution of 250 Å, in secondary mode, was obtained using an electrostatic lens design. The high brightness may also be exploited to yield very high resolution and/or high signal to noise images.