Microscope Digital Camera

In a previous post I talked about my search for a cheap but useful camera attachment for the microscope. I thought I would try the Digital Blue QX5 Computer Microscope. I did try this toy microscope out. It was possible to get fairly decent photos with it but it took a lot of fiddling and playing with lights and didn't seem worth the effort to me.

I then decided to try out a microscope digital camera I found on Ebay. As far as I can tell, it has no product name. It just says "DCM130 (1.3M pixels, USB2.0) Digital Camera for Microscope." There is also a 3 megapixel version. It arrived in a nice box with 2 adaptors (one of them fit the camera to my Wild M5 perfectly), a USB cable, and a CD with a software package called ScopePhoto on it. As far as I can tell this product is manufactured in China and is being imported to the US by a few individuals. The software definitely has some issues with being written by a non-English speaker. Nevertheless, I found it fairly easy to figure out.

Overall I would highly recommend this little gadget. It does exactly what I want it to do -- it displays what I am seeing in the microscope on the computer and lets me take photos of it. The photos are pretty decent considering the price (I paid $149 on ebay for it). It takes videos, too, but I haven't tried that feature yet. I was able to calibrate the program so that it will measure lengths, widths, etc. There is even a function on it called "image fusion" that is sort of like automontage. I haven't really tried that out yet, but it looks useful.

There are several folks on Ebay who are selling this item for anywhere between $129 and $390. Take a look.