It has been a long-held dream of electron microscopy engineers to correct or eliminate the spherical aberration that theoretically occurs in the electron optics, a development that would dramatically improve the resolution of electron microscopes. Now Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation has developed the HD-2700, a next-generation STEM that is equipped with a spherical aberration corrector. Essentially, the corrector acts as a kind of concave lens that reduces the spherical aberration of the electron optics to the absolute minimum. As a result, a much smaller probe diameter is obtained while keeping the larger convergence angle, and this provides significantly improved resolution and analytical sensitivity. It is anticipated that the HD-2700 STEM will prove to be a powerful analytical tool in researching and developing next-generation semiconductors, materials, and nanotechnologies.