8-LED Illumination 230X Zooming USB Digital Microscope with Dock Stand and Tripod

Pros: Very useful in PCB inspection. Specialy if you use 0402 SMD components. Good price. Very easy to use.

Cons: The focus is not good in the borders of the image, but it's perfect in the center. You can't make focus in far located targets, just in very close to the microscope ones.

Other: Buy it if you need to see closer, but not if you need perfect focus in all the image area.

Pros: The built in illumination is very usefull.
The supplied snapshot software works well and keeps track of the snapshots.
Two zoom-levels work well and the focal range is good. There is also a slip-ring inside making the focus stay in place when not twisted so it won't accidentally be changed.

Cons: The tripod that is supplied is very poor, and if you tilt the scope to have it look at the table the tripod may fall over.
The button integrated in the camera seems to have very poor contact, and there is a very long delay between pressing it and having the software saying "click" and taking the picture.

Other: If you need a good usb microscope this is a good choice. Just don't expect the tripod to be worth much.

Pros: It is a quite nice microscope, especially considering the price. It is a UVC camera and works without any special drivers on Mac OS X. The camera has a resolution of 1280*1024. The thumb wheel is a combined focus and zoom wheel in a pretty odd way, but maybe this is common on this kind of camera/microscope. At one end it zooms out to about 8 mm across the picture, and can focus at about +5 to -10 mm measured from the edge of the clear plastic ring. At the other end it zooms in, with about 1.5 mm across, and then can focus at about 0 to -10 mm (yes, 10 mm inside the ring, and it can't focus outside of the ring), and the magnification is largest when focus is at the edge of the ring. The focal depth is very narrow, less than 1 mm I think, bit this is quite common on microscopes.

Cons: It would be nice if it could focus further away when zoomed in.

Other: Pretty nice deal!

Pros: - very good magnification
- solid illumination
- works in linux (Ubuntu 9.04) without installing extra driver (appears as dig.camera)
- tripod as bonus

Cons: - if you want to switch from lower magnification to higher one (230x) - or vice versa - you need to turn by slip-ring quite a lot (almost to the edge position) so I am affraid of releasing of this part. It could be overused quite soon.
- a tripod is not quite stable

Other: Very good review was at http://www.freelabs.com/~whitis/reviews/230X_USB_Microscope/index.xhtml