Sometimes oxides are friendly; x-ray or neutron diffraction solves the structure and (at most) simple HREM does a double check. Sometimes they are not. Problems can range from phase purity (identifiable using EDX) to more subtle issues about the true unit cell and/or atom locations. The latter are often particularaly hard for x-ray or neutron to handle when single crystal data is not available and, for instance, the samples are polyphase or textured.

One common problem is that the unit cell is rather larger than originally thought due to a superstructure. While superstructure reflections may be obvious in the microscope due to the very large dynamic range of TED patterns, they may not show in powder patterns. The issue then is to determine the true structure using (often) a combination of HREM and TED plus multislice simulations to confirm the structure.