Modern imaging techniques for metals and alloys

New developments have occurred in transmission electron microscopy and scanning electron microscopy, bearing in mind that the principal reason of doing microscopy in the first place, is to scrutinize the structure—property relationship. There still remain, however, fundamental and practical reasons which hamper a straightforward correlation between microscopic structural information with the properties of metals and alloys. It is argued that one should refocus more on the generic features of defects, using a mesoscopic approach including various length scale transitions, and on in situ rather than on postmortem observations of solely atomic structures.