I Heart Microscopes | Hacker News Reader

I Heart Microscopes

hillelwayne.com

90 pointshwayne43 comments

I’m looking for a “casual” but good microscope, to show my kids these nice things. I’m a biologist and I’m used to the expensive Zeiss and Leica ones but have no idea of prices and where to start. I guess I would like to be able to see (blood) cells but also butterfly wings so something with multiple objective would be nice? Or is that too expensive? What can you get for, say 100-200 eur?

A few here. I have bought many things from Science Surplus (sciplus.com) and have always been pleased.

A $150 400X monocular "student grade" microscope: https://www.sciplus.com/400x-student-grade-monocular-microsc...

A $334 (up to) 1000X binocular "top quality" student microscope: https://www.sciplus.com/top-quality-student-binocular-micros...

Or, at microscope.com there are several in your price range. Here is an example, an Omano 40X-1000X Student Monocular Compound Microscope for $179: https://www.microscope.com/popular-microscopes/omano-om118-m...

+one billion points for ASS.

I love ASS, its one of the best stores in the US. If you have a chance to visit one I would highly recommend it. Their product labels are cheeky and adorable and they have all sorts of wonderful, random shit

Your post only makes sense if you click any of the GP's provided links. The GP's post only shows sciplus.com and Science Surplus. You have to actually view the site to see that it is American Science & Surplus for your post of "I love ASS" to make sense. In other corners of the interweb, that comment might get you different responses ;-)

Quite frankly, I'm not sure why the other poster left off an important part of the store's name. Its not "Science Surplus", as you state its "American Science and Surplus"

The full name leads to a wonderful acronym

I did only because of their domain name but I should have written it out in its entirety.

What would you recommend for someone who a) wants to see something as small as mushroom spores, and b) would like to take decent quality pictures of them? DSLR or smartphone mount if there's one that's not super fiddly?

I use c-mount web cameras. Look for a scope with a trinocular head, and then get a c-mount adapter and a c-mount web cam (super-cheap on amazon).

DSLRs are nice, excellent image quality, but quite expensive and heavy for the job.

I'm an astrophotography nut, but I can see where imaging with a telescope has similar issues/hurdles as imaging with a microscope. There are mounts that allow you to position a smartphone on the exit pupil of an eye piece of a telescope so that you get the benefits of the magnification of the eye piece. I can only imagine that there are similar for microscopes as well.

As for using a DSLR with the microscope, I'm guessing it might have similar issues as astronomy. When attaching the camera to the telescope (possibly same for microscope), you lose the magnification of the eye pieces. The image data is hitting the tiny tiny pixels of the DSLR so that the scale of things will be very small in your high megapixel image. This is why so many people prefer lower resolution cameras as the pixel sizes on the sensor are much larger. Just based on experience with optics, I'd imagine this would hold true to microscopes as well.

I personally think that a microscope without the knobs to move the table left/right and forwards/backwards shouldn't exist, or at least shouldn't be sold.

I can't imagine having to move the <thing that you're watching> with your own hands...

But then again, maybe I'm just spoiled, since I'm used to the microscopes that we have at the university aka. higher budget (>1000€).

Still to anyone looking to buy a microscope, I would very highly recommend that they get one with knobs to move the table.

Do you know of any good sellers that sell in Europe?

Here's an AmScope 40-1000x binocular compound scope with a 3-axis mechanical stage and LED illumination for a paltry $239.

https://amscope.com/collections/compound-microscopes/product...

130$ shipping to EU... :D

AmScope 2500x binocular is possibly the best for the money (250 dollars) https://www.ebay.com/itm/AmScope-40X-2500X-Binocular-Lab-Com...

Interesting, much resemblance between that and the microscope.com Omano scopes I reference above in my last link.

A lot of OEM is happening here, I guess

Like everything, these are all actually made by something like Shenzen Golden Rooster Optical Instruments

Have you had the chance to test it out? If so, how's the quality of the objectives/lenses?

I've bought it two times: when it was $150 and $200. Both times consistently received very high quality device.

If your kids are young, I'd strongly reccommend an ~10x or so binocular microscope. Its a lot easier for younger kids to recognize what they are looking at. I tried higher magnification microscopes with my kids, but they were young enough that it mostly just confused them.

Its also nice to be able to put the microscope in a case and take it with you while exploring. I used a little flashlight for the stage light, and it worked well.

It's sort of like exploring the night sky with a pair of binoculars before getting a big telescope. Its helps to get oriented first. Then, if your kids are into it, you can upgrade your equipment.

I second this; unless you're trying to look at chromosomes or detailed cellular organelles, 10X really is great. Excellent image quality, cheap, less likely to damage the objective or slide when you inevitably try to focus too close.

Just did this myself. Today, definitely buy the industrial camera 'zoom tube' type.

Upsides: HMDI out, straight to your TV. Should include an adjustable ring LED with the scope. Real time images (ie. video of moving things), smooth zoom (so you don't lose the subject), >100-200x magnification, and at very low cost. Inherently social.

Better models allow saving of stills or images, but I'd say avoid that and go cheap, just take images of the screen with a mobile phone or buy an HDMI capture device if your really want to add that later. The actual microscope places hate this product category, because it undercuts their out of date lowball analog optical microscopes.

The downsides are that you can't use conventional objectives, you don't know precise magnification at midpoint positions if you want to do subject measurement, and you can't do some of the fancier stuff ... but then again lowball analog optical microscopes can't either.

See https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/reviews-of-digital-microscop... for examples and discussion.

For 10, you can get a foldscope. Nice for taking it outside. Not what you're asking for, but cheap enough to consider for a different use case.

This one has given me and my son many hours of wonder -

Carson MicroBrite Plus 60x-120x Power LED Lighted Pocket Microscope

https://www.amazon.com/Carson-MicroBrite-60x-120x-Lighted-Mi...

Cheap but surprisingly capable.

I ordered this one, thanks for the tip, can't go wrong at that price. If they really enjoy it we can look for something more fancy :)

I splurged £405 on a Euromex ED.1805-S EduBlue. It's a stereomicroscope with a built-in 3MP camera, not as expensive as a Leica EZ4W, A60F or Emspira 3, which is what I'd get if money were no object, but still decent quality and a step up from the realm of toy USB microscopes like my Celestron 44302.

Compound microscopes are much more fiddly because you need to prepare slides, and thus less versatile and less interesting for kids, but that's what's required to view blood cells or fine detail.

amscope compound microscope: https://amscope.com/collections/microscopes/products/b120c $250US, fits roughly in your budget). Their scopes are solid and well-engineered for the prices.

There are low-cost options too:

I had fun years ago using the lens from a CD player laser as a microscope for my phone. The setup is dead simple: hold the lens with a bobby pin and attach it in front of your phone's camera with a rubber band. A portable microscope that records video!

There are also small plastic scopes about the size of a D battery (would recommend one with lights). Definitely toys, but uh toys can be fun too.

A junior explorer pocket microscope (https://opentinkers.com/collections/toddlers/products/junior...) is about 10$ and comes without light, but the transparent plastic allows using a phone flashlight. In the end, I find it better than having its own (weaker) light source. Less prone to failure, no extra battery/weight.

If any students are reading this and are a bit short on money, the thing that I tried was asking at the University the person that's responsible for maintaining the microscopes if they've got any old ones that are no longer in the system / written out. They might be old and maybe have some things broken, but it's much better then not having a microscope at all!

When I tried this I got a very old german one, which still works perfectly, the only real issue with it is that it no longer has a light, but I fixed that by simply using my phone's flash and covering the flash with a piece of paper so that the light is diffused.

I think this option is really good for beginners because essentially you're getting a professional grade microscope and because it might be broken here and there you won't feel that bad tinkering with it, which will in the end just result in you knowing your microscope much better!

Also many things are standard, so you might be able to just get replacement parts if needed.

Just an option, that you might want to check out ^^

This doesn't apply only for microscope, but for pretty much anything, many universities and companies have old gear that's no longer in use and is just sitting in storage, written out, that they'll happily give away. Including books! Especially at the university's library where they might be space constrained, they often just give old books away! At my unversity they have two tables infront of the library and on it they put books that you can take and keep.

When I got my microscope, as a thanks I gave the professor an orchid and a black chocolate ^^

I once made a macro-lens [1] for a DSLR camera to serve as a microscope. You can do this by mounting a zoom lens the wrong way on the camera. It's a very fun project.

Anyway, a surprising thing I learned, is the very slow movement of things that appear stationary. For instance, we would set the subject on top of a book and some papers to get it to the right height. We used a long exposure time (maybe one minute?) to get enough light. And during that time, the book and paper would decompress and rise enough to blur the image completely. The solution was just to wait five minutes for things to settle.

[1] "macro", because it magnifies the subject as compared to the camera's sensor.

Our main state university had an open day as part of a national "Science Week". They had a bunch of Leica stereo dissecting scopes set up on benches with random aquatic plants, bugs and other stuff in small dishes, that looked like it was something that you just pull out of your local creek. People could come in and just take a look.

It was incredible. Zooming in on some of the plants, it was like there was a entire world in there that was completely invisible to the human eye.

It reminded me of Feynman's quote/lecture about there being "plenty of room at the bottom". It put it into perspective about just how much room there really was.

I just spent most of the past few years building my own motorized microscope for automated acquisition. As of yesterday, I successfully trained a tardigrade object detector and used it to do real-time tracking of tardigrades as they move around on a slide, for hours (yes, there is actually a hypothesis).

Also, this article discusses/ranks a few reasonably microscopes:

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-micros...

I love microscopes too. The sad part is that if you zoom in further, you lose all the color.

Can you lower the intensity of the light source as you zoom in? Would that help retain any color? If the light itself isn't dimmable, you can buy small squares of ND filters that could be used.

I think the comment is referring to the fact that "zooming in" below the wavelength of light (e.g. with electron microscopy) means you can't see color.

Yes, that is what I assumed as well.

https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/photomicrography-c...

The 2022 submission date is April 30th.

"It’s something that completely breaks my intuition of the macroscopic world"

I think the physics world is similar to quantum physics where the smaller things get, the more strange things become.

Indeed. Gravitational effects become negligible compared to mechanical/EM effects at low mass/low volume. This is why insects can crawl on the ceiling but you can't.

"Life at low Reynolds number" https://science.curie.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Purcell_...

I love the article. Microscopes are so cool. I hope you can share more photos about anything like microelectronic stuff, more bugs or whatever. Love your post!

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