Spectrum Scientifics Blog

A friend of the store sent us this picture of a ‘microscope kit’ he found at a drug store during the holidays. This same kit could have been found in a department store or general toy store:

You see these things pop up in big stores, especially around the holidays. They are bought at a low price and then discounted a bit more. But no matter what you paid for it, it is going to be junk. The box is probably the most durable part of it. Now, when it comes to telescopes, many an amateur astronomer has written pages and pages describing the flaws in junky department store telescopes, but the flaws in junk microscopes is more limited. What is wrong with you may ask? Well let’s break it down:

Magnification Claims

OK, the box proudly displays “900X” twice, with the other magnifications being 400X and 100X. This already screams ‘junk’ from the get-go. Most compound microscopes, at least decently built ones, have magnifications of 40x, 100x and 400x. More advanced models may have a 1000x objective. But this doesn’t mean you can just crank up your microscope without a care. No, most high-powered telescopes require using a drop of immersion oil between the object being viewed and the objective lens. This is why most microscopes with high-powered lenses use higher-quality DIN objectives which are an effective international standard. Now look at that little plastic…thing..and tell us that it is going to be able to come within 100x of the high magnification of a biological microscope without any special work? Please.

Another problem is that the lowest magnification on this microscope is 100x. Better built compounds start at 40x for a reason: It has a wider viewing field and lets you find the object you want to view, and it has an easier time focusing. When you start at 100x you are assured that you are going to probably focus on scratches on the coverslip.

Box Pictures

In the lower left corner several bright, colorful pictures are shown, promising the view such vivid images will be open to them when the use this microscope. This seems unlikely, a blurry, distorted version of these images is more like it. Putting images like this on a microscope is like putting planets shots from the Voyager Space Probe on a plastic telescope’s box. It is misleading.

The Packaging

Look at how the microscope is presented. The microscope itself is actually only a portion of the box, maybe a little more than a third of the packaging. The rest is a box with special sectioning for the all tools they include as if this were an amazing deal. The box copy even emphasizes this by calling it a microscope ’set’ and boasts of the ‘28 pieces’. What are the 27 other pieces? Let’s look at a picture of this item out of the box:

So we have 4 plastic tools of dubious use, a plastic petri dish (why? Are you really going to grow bacteria), some slides and coverslips (might be useful if this microscope wasn’t junk), a four ’sample’ tubes (with stale brine shrimp eggs and some fibers) and a couple of other parts. None of this is really worthy of the space it takes up. Any decent quality beginner microscope will probably have a pack like this, but the manufacturer doesn’t make a huge-space-taking deal out of it. They are instead packaged simply with the microscope without excess fanfare.

The Microscope Itself

Well do this in two parts, the first just from what we can observe in the box and from reviews online.

First thing you may notice is that this microscope has an almost ‘retro’ frame angle tilt to it. Why does it have this? I don’t know. Most microscopes do not have angled bodies these days.

Why? Because most microscopes these days have built in illumination. The angle in microscopes bodies was so that you could use a built-in tilting mirror to reflect light up into the condenser lens and thus the slide. The angle made it easier to catch light from a decent light source. But these days it is just old-school design as even this junky model has an illuminator (albeit a poor one). It might mean that the factory simply has not seen fit to upgrade it’s design over the past few decades. That might seem economical but really it is just sloppy as angled microscope plates can mean trouble moving the slide into the position you want, especially with young hands.

The Objectives are almost a joke. I’ve already discussed the magnification issues, but a basic examination of the objectives shows stubby little things that are thinner than a child’s pinky. We can’t examine the optics, but the mechanics (focuser, objective ring, etc) certainly have a cheap look to them.

An examination of reviews online seems to confirm this: there are complains about the focuser flaking off in kid’s hands, and the focuser sticking, parts breaking off, light bulbs burning out quickly, etc. There are also some positive reviews, but one must take them with a grain of salt - some folks are going to give a positive review to anything they buy because their kids plays with it, and some folks just don’t know how much better they could have done.

This microscope sells from anywhere from $24 to $40, and at any price it is a waste of money. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money get a magnifier and perhaps a pocket microscope. These would be much better choices for that kind of money.

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Filed under: Microscope