Portable USB Adjustable 200X Digital Microscope with LED Illumination

Pros: - Focus range: 0-infinity - Adjustable light intensity. - Does not feel like it will break easily. - Lens opening is recessed about 5 mm into open end of the aluminum tube, and in front of it are the LEDs in a ring, and a plastic ring in front of the LEDs. Lens opening between the LED ring is about 3 mm. It seems pretty hard to touch or scratch the lens by mistake.

Cons: On mine it is hard to get really good focus in the leftmost part of the picture. On the center and the right focus is pretty good. Slow updates in low light conditions, but that is expected.

Other: Very good USB microscope in the <$80 class. And this is one of the cheapest in that class!

Pros: This is a quite nice microscope, especially considering its price and size, though the optics leaves a little bit more to wish for. It is a UVC camera and works without any special drivers on Mac OS X and should work directly on other OSes too. The camera has a resolution of 640*480. With the plastic cone mounted, it has a viewing field of about 12 mm across the picture with the object at the edge of the cone. Without the cone you can focus all the way down to the edge of the aluminum tube, and even about 1 mm inside the tube. Focus at the other end is infinity (and beyond, actually, :-) ), so it can be used as an ordinary camera too, though pretty light insensitive. You adjust focus by turning the top 3 cm of the tube, about 6 turns from infinity to -1 mm.

Cons: The optics when focused near the edge of the tube gives quite a bit of chromatic dispersion, and my gets a bit blurred on the right half of the picture.

Other: Pretty good, especially considering the price and the size.

Pros: Seems to have fairly good range, optics aren't exactly lab quality, but very usable for small electronics repairs and such.

Cons: Tripod is kind of useless since it weighs virtualy nothing. It seems to move around and tip over a lot more than I would like it to. Focusing is a bit of a challenge at times, but I think this is to be expected from this type of design.

Other: For the price, I don't think you can do too much better. I wouldn't expect anything close to lab quality, but this thing is great for hobby and diy style uses.