Customer Reviews

Celestron 44320 Microscope Digital Kit MDK

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I bought it, tried it and immediatley returned it.
All PLASTIC. No fine focus, image capturing was poor and not adjustable.
Save yourself the bother.... buy a different microscope

I purchased this item for my son as a Christmas gift and found it to be a complete waste of money and time, and a lot of frustration. Product, due to being of plastic, is not of a good quality. Working with optics is like playing with a fresh egg. Yeap!
The worst part is a digital camera and its software. After the installation of it according to the instructions it caused the computer to crash. I tried another computer with a recomended operating system and... no communication with a device and crashing again. Well, in spite of my dilligent efforts to have it make to work I have gotten nowhere with it.
I won't even mention my boys' heartbroken feelings...

This bad boy was pretty cheap as far as microscopes go but it lets you see well beyond what you can with the naked eye quite well. Older kids will be able to handle looking through the scope but little ones will have trouble. The best part for that is the camera. The camera takes pictures or video when you hook it up to a computer and the process is simple.

The light is a little hot for anything in water so take care to use the pen light that shines from above when possible at least until you find what you are looking for.

Also, there is no guard in place to prevent you from cracking a slide by focusing in too far so always pay attention if you're not already familiar with microscopes.

I was very disappointed in the quality of this microscope. I expected more from Celestron. I bought this for my son's 6th birthday and chose this one for the digital camera. I thought it would be easier for both of us to view the slides on the computer. The quality of the digital image is poor at best and makes the camera worthless. I wasn't expecting HD images but I was expecting to be able to actually see what was on the side. The scope is entirely plastic with so much light filtering through the plastic tube up to the eye piece that the image is distorted. The images viewed directly though the microscope aren't too bad but if that is all you're looking for put your money in a better scope without the camera. I packed it up, sent it back and bought just that.

This is a 50 dollar microscope. It does the deed, fairly well, but not superbly. Some advice:

1. Yes, there is some plastic and it's packaged in styrofoam so there will be a lot of static electricity and hence, dust -- use an air can to blow it away.

2. The camera is a simple CMOS one that has drivers for all Windows OS to date, but they are unsigned! (What is up with that, Celestron?) Hence Win7 won't accept them. You'll have to dig up an old XP box or laptop to run the camera.

3. The camera (rather easily) replaces the eyepiece and hence, takes away the 10-20x eyepiece magnification. So you are looking at 30x max for pictures that you can then blow up to your heart's content, but with loss of detail. As well, the focus is hard to do well with the camera on, compared to looking through the eyepiece, but it's not unusable.

4. Really, the optics aren't bad for $50. You'll have a hard time looking at coins for example, because even at lowest settings, the magnification is really good.

5. For best results, keep gunk off the optics. One way to gunk them up is if you put the slide in upside down, and the glue to the top glass on the slide gets rubbed on the stage. ;) As the manual says, you can clean the optics with photography camera cleaner.

6. My kit came with a very useful contrast light diffuser, negating any problems with heat from the LED light beneath the stage.

Really, I'm pretty happy with this toy. As a grown adult, I plan to use it to get ideas for art from the microscopic world. It serves its purpose for me.

I bought this microscope and sent it to my son for my Grandson and he to look at bugs. Straight out of the box, the lenses were so dirty that you couldn't see through it. My son tried cleaning them to no avail. He trashed ti before I could get it back. It is a piece of crap.

I've had mine for about a week. The adjustments aren't smooth; actually they are rather sticky. When adjusting the viewpoint it moves up or down laterally or in an oblique so you don't keep the same view.

With my microscope there was a piece of something (maybe a piece of black plastic) stuck to the optics that is not easily removeable. It creates an irritating obstruction.

The video camera is placed on an unadjustable section or rather it is screwed into place. You have to turn the whole microscope to adjust magnification.

The construction and finish are very cheap. Plastic pieces press fit together and finished, internally, with some form of gray paint.

With software issues: I have XP...there were no problems, the window should have been expandable to view object details with clarity.

It does not support the mac, and the software will constantly die when in windows 7, even though it says that is supported. You can also tell that a lot of corners were cut with this, as it is completely plastic, and I already see some cracks on it even though it has barely seen any use.

I bought this thingy two years ago. Used once with mediocre results. It is now sitting on the shelf, gathering dust.

In addition, the software that came with "it" pops up smack in the middle of XP screen with an obnoxious console after the bootup.
During installation several XP warnings came up not to install "it", which I ignored to my later chagrin.

The console says "AVSTAR" and cannot be removed even after I pitched the program.

Celestron gave itself a black eye putting this junk on the market. It makes me suspicious of any product made by Celestron.

I bought this a few years ago for an online biology course. It is a cheap piece of plastic and not worth the frustration. I could never really see much of anything and I give that credit to no fine focus knob. I am currently looking for another microscop. You should too.