Digital USB Microscope Video Camera

by DBtech

Product Details

• Item Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• ASIN: B0011E0IYW
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #48,654 in Office Products (See Top 100 in Office Products)
  • #87 in Office Products > Educational Supplies > Classroom Science Supplies > Microscopes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 17, 2007

Product Description

This new Digital USB Microscope turns your computer into a great tool for microscopic exploration! Connects directly to your computer with a simple USB connection. Software for connection drivers and viewer is included. 1.3 Mega pixel digital camera allows you to capture still images or video. 200x lens allows for 1280 px x 1024 px capture resolution. 24bit RGB color. Manual focus from 10mm to infinity. AVI video format with internal lighting. Microscope stand included. Use with Operating Systems: Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/VISTA and Mac. Product Warranty 90 days.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars worth it, September 10, 2008

By 

Forensic Engineer "Al" (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Digital USB Microscope Video Camera (Office Product)

I hunted for the best digiscope for the money all over ebay, amazon, onlinesciencemall, shopping dot com and others. This appears to be it. Here are the highlights:
-I am able to get a good focus & resolution shot at 100x; beyond that it's a bit fuzzy. 100x means that 1/16 inch wide part shows up as 6 inches wide on the screen. That's good enough. You can just double the zoom on the screen after that.
-taking a movie is the best option; start the movie by clicking the mouse on "start capture". Playback the movie on windows media player and take a screenshot (printscreen saves the image to clipboard). Copy to word (right-click, paste)or openoffice then export the file to .pdf to reduce the file size. This works fine.
-The movies are very large size. 300MB in one example. The file could be uploaded to Google docs as opposed to emailing this behemoth.
-An improvement would be to take a snapshot with the mouse as well. It's impractical to press the red button without going out of focus. It's possible to tape the red button shut and just keep the last shot.
-The scope lights stay on, but the lighting of the live image is controlled on the screen. Thus there is decent lighting control, although it could be improved.
- I would not buy a model without the stand. I use business cards to shim the height as necessary.
-It runs on the power from the USB; no batteries or other power supply nec.
-This is adequate for preliminary and possibly final forensic photos. It is not the best device, and certainly no match to the lab stereomicroscope. It does however, pick up where the microphoto camera leaves off and can save time/expense in sending the part to a lab.
-If you are a forensic scientist or engineer (like me) I'd say it's a great companion to a portable laptop and worthy of the forensic toolkit.
-Again, I believe it's the best bang for the buck, not the best.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good microscope, July 24, 2008

By 

Stephen Friend "Steve Francis" (MD,USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Digital USB Microscope Video Camera (Office Product)

Nice little microscope, picture is reasonable

Its actually a very high quality stand it comes with, and does not look at all cheap.

Very educational, we keep it plugged into the PC, and my kids love looking at things from the garden

Picture is reasonable quality, and does produce some nice close up pictures.
We were quite pleased with this, does the job very well as a microscope.

Just adjust the focus wheel, and picture comes into focus, image is quite sharp, when focused correctly

Had no problem connecting it to PC, dont know what others are complaining about.

Money well spent on an educational thing, for children
(4.5 star rating)

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Microscope wonderful, when the connections work..., May 5, 2008

By 

J. Christensen "womanhunter" (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Digital USB Microscope Video Camera (Office Product)

1) This microscope requires you to focus and press the snapshot button--hard--to take a picture, while simultaneously trying to keep the camera perfectly still. 2) I can't remember what combination of menu items I had to click in the included software, Digital Microscope - DirectShow Video Capture Sample, ver 1.00, copyright Syntek Corp, before I got the program to preview any image at all. 3) Each time you click the red button to take a snapshot, a new window opens OVER the preview window, so you have to save and close the image, or at least drag and drop it elsewhere, everytime you snap a shot. 4) The folder where the Digital Microscope program saves image files by default is a system folder under Windows. Hmm. That's awkward. 5) I found that I preferred previewing and editing the images in Photoshop Elements 2.0, which, once I reinstalled the driver/software a few times recognized the microscope as a TWAIN device. The preview window has a button you click to take the snapshot. Plus, wherever you save the first file, the rest are saved to the same place unless you specify a different target destination. Now all that aside, I just tried to use my microscope again, however now Photoshop Elements is giving me an error message and even after I reinstalled everything, neither Digital Microscope - DirectShow Video Capture nor Elements will preview images from the microscope.