Early review of Digital Blue QX5 toy microscope

[npaden]

Well, I've been wanting to get a microscope for some time and everytime I ask I'm told that a good one is several hundred bucks if you find a good deal on ebay and anything else is a toy.

So I went ahead and bought a toy. I paid around $75 including shipping.

It is pretty decent. It does what I got it for which is to check out my rotifers and get a decent guess on how dense my culture is and see if they are mostly male or female and how many eggs they are carrying, etc.

It is a digital microscope and you actually look at the images on your computer screen. They seem to look better on the screen than when I export the pictures for some reason. I've just played with it for an hour or less so hopefully I'll figure it out a little more eventually.

Here is an example of a rotifer at 200X magnification. The screen is about 1mm wide at that magnification.

You can see that the rotifer is carrying several eggs in that picture if you look hard enough. (the eggs the light round things are at the top of the rotifer), you can also see that it has eaten a gut load of phytoplankton recently. Again, for some reason the pictures aren't quite as clear as I can see on my screen and also a little smaller than what you see live on the screen.

I also took a video of a day old maroon clown larvae at 60X magnification. You can see the little rotifers swimming around and then godzilla the clown zips in and out of the frame. I tried to take a picture of the clownfish but never was able to it was swimming around too fast.

You can check out some of the other images and video clips on my website: http://padens.com/files/microscope/

Oh well, the microscope works for what I need it to do. I'm sure a nice one would be alot easier and clearer but this was fun. Thought I would share my thoughts if anyone else is looking for something similar.

Here is a link to where I bought my microscope: http://www.meritline.com/hotinplayser.html

You might be able to find it cheaper, but they shipped out reasonably fast and seem somewhat reputable.

FWIW, Nathan

 

[oama]

Very interesting!

For those considering a 'scope, general hatchery work and/or zoo plankton cultures, you generally only need a dissecting microscope with a 10x to 30x power. But, i don't know of any that are as inexpensive as this scope!

 

[ediaz]

Great find,

The cheapest i found for a dissecting is $200. In all the time at the hatchery I only used a compound scope 2 or 3 times maybe.

Ed

 

[npaden]

In fairness to the scope I need to clarify that the images were done with the subjects in a shallow petri dish with about 1mm of water. With the depth of focus at 200x magnification that is a big reason for the lack of quality of the image I think. I'm going to get some real slides and I think I should be able to focus much better at higher magnifications.

 

[jnowell]

I think I saw this scope at Hobby Lobby last night. It was $99 there, I wanted to try it out, but didn't want to risk $100 in case it was a useless toy. Thanks for being the brave one. I think I may go back by there and pick that one up or order one after hearing your testimony.