light microscope is that for everyone and if so how do you do it?

[Toronto Photography]

light microscope is that for everyone and if so how do you do it?

No idea how it is done and how complex it is. Never seen it mentioned except jsut recently.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

For the uninitiated in the compound microscope everything is upside down

No, that's called an inverted microscope. A compound microscope is one that has both an objective and an ocular. A microscope with a single lens is called a simple microscope.

 

[JimH123]

inexpensive 1000x usb microscope

a google searche for "usb microscope camera" hit on this...many inexpensive 1000x microscope using USB to send images to computer

https://www.amazon.com/USB-Microscopes/b?ie=UTF8&node=2742273011

Cheap and 1000x magnification are mutually exclusive facts.

To get to 1000x you usually need oil immersion objectives and a reliable mechanical design to hold everything steady and in alignment. The 100x objective plus the 10x eyepiece will cost $many alone. In Australia the cheapest 100x oil immersion objective I could find is AU$260 and the necessary 10x eyepiece is guess about AU$30 at the cheapest. Plus a microscope body to hold it all together. Think more like AU$1000 all up to get something reliable and good as a minimum to do reliable and convenient 1000x observations.

Naturally 1000x is limited in use and more for stained bacterial material or sliced tissue samples and the like, depth of field is measured in microns so only thin or flat things can be viewed and they need to be carefully prepared in a slide with a glass cover for the oil immersion objective to work. Looking at living pond life is more down in the 5x to 50x linear observation range, which is what I suspect that linked cheap device handles.

My guess the "1000x" in those cheapy "microscopes" refers to 1000x area magnification and not 1000x linear magnification, so the likely limit is maybe 32x linear magnification (square root of 1,000). Common marketing trick with cheap microscopes and magnifiers.

They are fun to play with but most people soon tire of their inadequacies, I even have a $10 or $15(?) clip-on for a smartphone or tablet that gives reasonable super macro results. There are better ones of course https://thedroidguy.com/macro-lens-for-smartphones-1089257

among the regular 'scopes this was buried, which is something I've been thinking about...no idea if this is any good, I just looked at it myself...

"https://www.amazon.com/BEBIRD-Otosc...d=1618994029&s=photo&sr=1-10&ts_id=2742273011"

https://www.amazon.com/BEBIRD-Otoscope-Endoscope-，Compatible-Inspection/dp/B08NW54MG6/ref=sr_1_10?_encoding=UTF8&c=ts&dchild=1&keywords=Lab+Handheld+Digital+Microscopes&qid=1618994029&s=photo&sr=1-10&ts_id=2742273011

anybody have any experience with something like that?

Nice idea but don't expect good image quality or reliability at those prices.

sure, they are what they are...

here's a review of one, comparing the "fun 1000x microscope" to a professional microscope, at '1000x'...

Nice video, and the little microscope does well at what it does. But 1000x! Not even close. One could probably compute the actual magnification by considering the distance those 1 mm lines were apart from each others. But at 1000x, those lines would appear as 10 meters apart from each other. And would be so fat that they wouldn't look like lines.

 

[JimH123]

Just on the off chance someone reads this the other big issue with microscopy is preparation of the specimens. I did this a little as an undergraduate in 1976 and still bear the scars.

That's an important point!

I took my first photomicrograph , using a Swift monocular microscope of 1890 vintage coupled to a 1930's Box brownie. The subject was the algae Spirogyra in water from my garden pond. In 1949, I was eight years old and had quite a time learning how to use the scope. That was relatively easy with tiny pond life as the subject. Larger organisms proved MUCH more difficult, since I had to learn how to prepare them for microscopy! That started an odyssey lasting over fifty years. Throughout my career as a medical scientist, I continued to learn new microtechniques and never lost my love of photomicroscopy.

I still have my original scope together with several others and use them on a regular basis I am teaching my grand children pond life microscopy and so the cycle continues!

To the OP, It's not beyond your abilities, just try.

Back about age 15 and following years I spent many hours peering at pond life, always fascinating. Low magnification and dark field illumination made for less eye strain. No mechanical stage, I simply slid the slide about by hand to follow some of the more frisky swimmers. For the uninitiated in the compound microscope everything is upside down and flipped left to right, so learning to move things the correct way soon becomes second nature.

For me microscopy was always a hobby, just like photography is for me.

I did that too. My cheapy microscope had rotating objectives. But the only one that seemed clear enough to use gave me 50x, And I could see the larger swimmers. I found the rotifers most interesting.

The other objectives were useless.

**********************

After looking at the video one more time where he inserted the ruler, let's compute the power of that setup.

The laptop was a smaller laptop, so let's suppose the screen was 30 cm (300mm) across. And he was using a window that was perhaps 50% the width of the screen. Let's say 150mm. And in the screen, he was showing two of the mm lines with some space on either side. I suppose he could have dragged the ruler over to fit a line on both sides and one in the middle for a total of 2mm,

Dividing 150mm by 2mm results in an approx 75x power on the "advertised" 1000x. Quite a bit short of the mark I would say.

Ignoring that, the quality of the image was quite good. We just didn't have quite the magnification that was advertised! All we would have to do to reach 1000x would be to expand that view by another 13.3x!

Another way to look at this is that the camera is likely only 1250 pixels horizontally. To expand it by 13.3x, that would give us only 93 pixels to cover that 150mm window in the horizontal direction. That would be pixels on the screen that are about 1.5mm wide. Nope - this is not a good idea!

Obviously, the product marketing is aiming these claims to those who would never question the 1000x claim.

*************************************************

Using my Dino-Lite microscope, here are two images of a metric ruler to compare with what was in the video. The sensor is 1280 x 1024. But it has the option of resizing by 2x which I let it do so that it is now 2560 x 2048. And then, I used Topaz Sharpen AI to make it as sharp as I could make it.

Image 1 is at the lowest power.





Image 2 is at the highest power and seems to be the same power as the microscope in the video.

 

[bclaff]

Remember, in photography, magnification is image size divided by object size.

So we would be talking about the width of the sensor divided by the width of the object.

Do we know the size of that sensor?

 

[JimH123]

Remember, in photography, magnification is image size divided by object size.

So we would be talking about the width of the sensor divided by the width of the object.

Do we know the size of that sensor?

I am unable to find the size of the sensor mentioned anywhere on the internet. Only the number pixels. I'm sure it is very small.

And I'm sure that power is not a useful spec for this product. Better is to just understand the size of the field of view as in the two images I posted which range from about 57mm at the low end to 2mm at the high end.

 

[bclaff]

Remember, in photography, magnification is image size divided by object size.

So we would be talking about the width of the sensor divided by the width of the object.

Do we know the size of that sensor?

I am unable to find the size of the sensor mentioned anywhere on the internet. Only the number pixels. I'm sure it is very small.

And I'm sure that power is not a useful spec for this product. Better is to just understand the size of the field of view as in the two images I posted which range from about 57mm at the low end to 2mm at the high end.

I agree that field of view is what matters in practice; but if the term magnification is used then it should be the photographic definition.

As for the sensor size. We can get a rough estimate based on the diameter of the microscope. For example if it's 16mm in diameter then the sensor is going to be less than 16mm in diagonal or about 11.3mm max width/height (divide sqrt(2))
And 11.3mm / 2mm would be about 5.65x in that case

 

[JimH123]

Remember, in photography, magnification is image size divided by object size.

So we would be talking about the width of the sensor divided by the width of the object.

Do we know the size of that sensor?

I am unable to find the size of the sensor mentioned anywhere on the internet. Only the number pixels. I'm sure it is very small.

And I'm sure that power is not a useful spec for this product. Better is to just understand the size of the field of view as in the two images I posted which range from about 57mm at the low end to 2mm at the high end.

I agree that field of view is what matters in practice; but if the term magnification is used then it should be the photographic definition.

As for the sensor size. We can get a rough estimate based on the diameter of the microscope. For example if it's 16mm in diameter then the sensor is going to be less than 16mm in diagonal or about 11.3mm max width/height (divide sqrt(2))
And 11.3mm / 2mm would be about 5.65x in that case

At the place where the sensor would be, the tube is 30mm in diameter. But they made it wide enough to allow for a ring of LED lights to surround it. I did see a size for the next model up which had double the number of pixels in each axis and it was 1/2.5". This one has to be smaller.

Here is an example of the surface of my watch. I hadn't realized that the surface was so scratched! I can't see any of these scratches with my eyes. But the microscope sure can see them. I had no idea!

This is at max magnification and as we saw with the ruler, it is a span of only 2mm. Could not focus any closer to see the LCD characters.

 

[bclaff]

Yeah, at 8x my 24mm APS-C sensor is 3mm horizontal FOV.
Probably 2-3x cost of the USB but I'm quite happy.

 

[Leonard Migliore]

For the uninitiated in the compound microscope everything is upside down

No, that's called an inverted microscope. A compound microscope is one that has both an objective and an ocular. A microscope with a single lens is called a simple microscope.

Let's start over. You are correct in stating that a compound microscope has both an objective and an ocular. Now, this is the same configuration that's seen in a Keplerian telescope and gives the same result: the image is upside down. So Mr. Parsons' statement is correct.

Inverted microscopes, which I have used a lot because I was a metallurgist, have folded optical paths so that the objective points upwards and you put the sample on a stage over the objective. The stage has a hole in it so the objective can see the sample. For various reasons, this is more convenient when you're trying to examine polished chunks of metal. Here's a link to a picture of one from Microscope World:

Loading…

www.microscopeworld.com

I have no idea whether these things reverse the image or not; by the time the optical path goes through all the prisms it's completely scrambled.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

For the uninitiated in the compound microscope everything is upside down

No, that's called an inverted microscope. A compound microscope is one that has both an objective and an ocular. A microscope with a single lens is called a simple microscope.

Let's start over. You are correct in stating that a compound microscope has both an objective and an ocular. Now, this is the same configuration that's seen in a Keplerian telescope and gives the same result: the image is upside down. So Mr. Parsons' statement is correct.

Oh, he means the image is upside down. I should have realized. That's right.

Ordinarily you just learn to deal with the inverted image, although for some (expensive) systems you can get an (expensive) erect-image head for specialized use.

Inverted microscopes, which I have used a lot because I was a metallurgist, have folded optical paths so that the objective points upwards and you put the sample on a stage over the objective. The stage has a hole in it so the objective can see the sample. For various reasons, this is more convenient when you're trying to examine polished chunks of metal. Here's a link to a picture of one from Microscope World:

https://www.microscopeworld.com/Images/LandingPageImages/inverted-metallurgical-microscope.jpg

It's also used for cultures in an aqueous medium, where the organisms are on the bottom of the culture dish.

I have no idea whether these things reverse the image or not; by the time the optical path goes through all the prisms it's completely scrambled.

They're specialized, not very convenient for a slide with a cover glass, and I suppose that they are more expensive. Mentioned by mistake.

 

[Leonard Migliore]

It's also used for cultures in an aqueous medium, where the organisms are on the bottom of the culture dish.

I know. I designed a laser system to target fluorescent cells in an acylic tray and then kill them with a laser pulse. One could refer to it as an inverted microscope but I also sent the laser pulses through the imaging optics, which made them real expensive.

 

[Guy Parsons]

For the uninitiated in the compound microscope everything is upside down

No, that's called an inverted microscope. A compound microscope is one that has both an objective and an ocular. A microscope with a single lens is called a simple microscope.

To be clearer - what I should have said is that when following some swimming little critter, to move the apparent view up the slide I move the slide down, to move the apparent view right and I need to move the slide left. Left-right and up-down is swapped.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

Yeah, Leonard Migliore figured it out. I should have realized. That's how things work at the speed of the Internet.

 

[Toronto Photography]

inexpensive 1000x usb microscope

a google searche for "usb microscope camera" hit on this...many inexpensive 1000x microscope using USB to send images to computer

https://www.amazon.com/USB-Microscopes/b?ie=UTF8&node=2742273011

Cheap and 1000x magnification are mutually exclusive facts.

To get to 1000x you usually need oil immersion objectives and a reliable mechanical design to hold everything steady and in alignment. The 100x objective plus the 10x eyepiece will cost $many alone. In Australia the cheapest 100x oil immersion objective I could find is AU$260 and the necessary 10x eyepiece is guess about AU$30 at the cheapest. Plus a microscope body to hold it all together. Think more like AU$1000 all up to get something reliable and good as a minimum to do reliable and convenient 1000x observations.

Naturally 1000x is limited in use and more for stained bacterial material or sliced tissue samples and the like, depth of field is measured in microns so only thin or flat things can be viewed and they need to be carefully prepared in a slide with a glass cover for the oil immersion objective to work. Looking at living pond life is more down in the 5x to 50x linear observation range, which is what I suspect that linked cheap device handles.

My guess the "1000x" in those cheapy "microscopes" refers to 1000x area magnification and not 1000x linear magnification, so the likely limit is maybe 32x linear magnification (square root of 1,000). Common marketing trick with cheap microscopes and magnifiers.

They are fun to play with but most people soon tire of their inadequacies, I even have a $10 or $15(?) clip-on for a smartphone or tablet that gives reasonable super macro results. There are better ones of course https://thedroidguy.com/macro-lens-for-smartphones-1089257

among the regular 'scopes this was buried, which is something I've been thinking about...no idea if this is any good, I just looked at it myself...

"https://www.amazon.com/BEBIRD-Otosc...d=1618994029&s=photo&sr=1-10&ts_id=2742273011"

https://www.amazon.com/BEBIRD-Otoscope-Endoscope-，Compatible-Inspection/dp/B08NW54MG6/ref=sr_1_10?_encoding=UTF8&c=ts&dchild=1&keywords=Lab+Handheld+Digital+Microscopes&qid=1618994029&s=photo&sr=1-10&ts_id=2742273011

anybody have any experience with something like that?

Nice idea but don't expect good image quality or reliability at those prices.

sure, they are what they are...

here's a review of one, comparing the "fun 1000x microscope" to a professional microscope, at '1000x'...

Nice video, and the little microscope does well at what it does. But 1000x! Not even close. One could probably compute the actual magnification by considering the distance those 1 mm lines were apart from each others. But at 1000x, those lines would appear as 10 meters apart from each other. And would be so fat that they wouldn't look like lines.

I have a tendency to agree with whatever I hear but this seems a bit off. As I was told metric works this way: 1 meter has 100 cm in it, So 1 cm at 100 mag would be 1 meter apart. At 1000 it would be 10 meters apart. 1 cm has 10 mm in it or 1 meter has 1000 mm in it. So 1 mm would be 1 meter apart at 1000 magnification.

However I await to be corrected.

 

[Guy Parsons]

Yeah, Leonard Migliore figured it out. I should have realized. That's how things work at the speed of the Internet.

Just my bad wording causing confusion. That's the Internet!

Meanwhile I stumbled over one of those USB hobby microscopes bought some years back cheaply, max magnification listed as 200x but dang thing is so old and the drivers have disappeared off the Internet, the CD won't perform and I suspect Windows10 will never get it to work.

Note to self: Must make a WinXP or Win2000 system disk for my desktop so I can run some of these old devices, like that microscope and also a costly film scanner.

 

[Guy Parsons]

I have a tendency to agree with whatever I hear but this seems a bit off. As I was told metric works this way: 1 meter has 100 cm in it, So 1 cm at 100 mag would be 1 meter apart. At 1000 it would be 10 meters apart. 1 cm has 10 mm in it or 1 meter has 1000 mm in it. So 1 mm would be 1 meter apart at 1000 magnification.

However I await to be corrected.

That seems to be the way the metric system works in this part of the world.

The metre is the base measurement standard for all the world, except three countries, divide that by 1000 to get a millimetre - "milli" of course indicating 1/1000.

The "1000x" rating may be based on seeing the image on a large screen where the screen size also adds to the magnification factor.

That thread he measured at 0.08mm diameter would appear to be 80mm wide at 1000x.

Even he said he doubted that it is 1000x magnification as per the example of a real 1000x shot from a "proper" microscope compared to what this $19 USB microscope offers.

Nevertheless it provides cheap fun to poke about in the micro world, even if the marketing numbers lie somewhat.

For me that is unusual, marketing telling lies.

What is the world coming to?

 

[Toronto Photography]

I have a tendency to agree with whatever I hear but this seems a bit off. As I was told metric works this way: 1 meter has 100 cm in it, So 1 cm at 100 mag would be 1 meter apart. At 1000 it would be 10 meters apart. 1 cm has 10 mm in it or 1 meter has 1000 mm in it. So 1 mm would be 1 meter apart at 1000 magnification.

However I await to be corrected.

That seems to be the way the metric system works in this part of the world.

The metre is the base measurement standard for all the world, except three countries, divide that by 1000 to get a millimetre - "milli" of course indicating 1/1000.

The "1000x" rating may be based on seeing the image on a large screen where the screen size also adds to the magnification factor.

That thread he measured at 0.08mm diameter would appear to be 80mm wide at 1000x.

Even he said he doubted that it is 1000x magnification as per the example of a real 1000x shot from a "proper" microscope compared to what this $19 USB microscope offers.

Nevertheless it provides cheap fun to poke about in the micro world, even if the marketing numbers lie somewhat.

For me that is unusual, marketing telling lies.

What is the world coming to?

It appears off by 3 or so factors but as you said with Screen taking in account it might be correct.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

Even he said he doubted that it is 1000x magnification as per the example of a real 1000x shot from a "proper" microscope compared to what this $19 USB microscope offers.

OK, guys, here's how microscope magnification works. The magnification of the objective is measured at the real, projected image in the microscope tube.

If you use an eyepiece, it presents a virtual image, whose magnification is specified by angle, or in practice by size at a certain distance (which is a way of specifying an angle). It's actually calculated for a virtual image at 10 inches (25 cm), so a 10 mm subject at the eyepiece focus gives a virtual image that appears to be 10 x 10 mm = 100 mm at a distance of 10" (25 cm). Together, with objective and eyepiece, you multiply the magnifications, so a 20x objective with a 10x eyepiece gives a magnification of 200x, which means that a 1mm subject looks like 200mm at a distance of 10" (25 cm).

Now, with photomicrography, the "photo eyepiece", as it is sometimes called, projects a real image onto the photo sensor. The magnification is the image size divided by the subject size.

If you do funny things like pointing a camera lens at the microscope eyepiece, the magnification is a little harder to predict. It just depends on what you did.

Now, real microscopists don't usually give the magnification on a photo. Instead they include a bar for scale, which might typically be 1 mm or 100 micrometers, or whatever. The problem is that you usually don't know how big the image will be displayed, so magnification can be meaningless. But that scale bar always tells you what you need to know.

A 1000x microscope for $19? Sounds like something they sell in magazine ads to unknowing people.

 

[foot]

Even he said he doubted that it is 1000x magnification as per the example of a real 1000x shot from a "proper" microscope compared to what this $19 USB microscope offers.

OK, guys, here's how microscope magnification works. The magnification of the objective is measured at the real, projected image in the microscope tube.

If you use an eyepiece, it presents a virtual image, whose magnification is specified by angle, or in practice by size at a certain distance (which is a way of specifying an angle). It's actually calculated for a virtual image at 10 inches (25 cm), so a 10 mm subject at the eyepiece focus gives a virtual image that appears to be 10 x 10 mm = 100 mm at a distance of 10" (25 cm). Together, with objective and eyepiece, you multiply the magnifications, so a 20x objective with a 10x eyepiece gives a magnification of 200x, which means that a 1mm subject looks like 200mm at a distance of 10" (25 cm).

Now, with photomicrography, the "photo eyepiece", as it is sometimes called, projects a real image onto the photo sensor. The magnification is the image size divided by the subject size.

If you do funny things like pointing a camera lens at the microscope eyepiece, the magnification is a little harder to predict. It just depends on what you did.

Now, real microscopists don't usually give the magnification on a photo. Instead they include a bar for scale, which might typically be 1 mm or 100 micrometers, or whatever. The problem is that you usually don't know how big the image will be displayed, so magnification can be meaningless. But that scale bar always tells you what you need to know.

A 1000x microscope for $19? Sounds like something they sell in magazine ads to unknowing people.

crazy crazy thought...

since camera sensors are made up of millions of tiny lenses and sensors...

and each pixel is very tiny...maybe around 5.1 microns...

why not just drop the specimin on the sensor, directly?

lol

 

[FrancoD]

crazy crazy thought...

since camera sensors are made up of millions of tiny lenses and sensors...

and each pixel is very tiny...maybe around 5.1 microns...

why not just drop the specimin on the sensor, directly?

lol

how do you get it in focus ?