This is my review of a neat little toy that I came across while writing this book. I went into some technicalities which I think are sufficiently explained, but they aren’t essential to readers here. I have my reservations about this gadget as a tool, but I recommend it as an informative toy for youngsters.
Mine seems to have no brand, but it is a camera, sold by various suppliers as a “digital microscope”, and it comes with a USB cable. Mine cost me about $26 on eBay, and it came minus the software, but the suppliers promptly gave me a link so I could get amcap.exe (for Windows). On my MacBook, I just use Photo Booth to capture the images.
I got another one from Amazon, but there seem to be many versions out there: just enter USB microscope into your search engine.
The camera looks like this: the USB lead delivers the power to light up the LEDs. The right-hand shot shows the cicada shell that was being taken in the middle shot. As you can see, the pictures are sharp and clear, but the gadget comes with deceptive labelling.
On the carton, there are magnifications as high as x1600, while this one is only claimed to be x1000, and on the gadget, we are told we can change between x40 and x1000. This is all rubbish! I decided to test this, using the handy scale that came with the gadget, and below this are the two extremes that I could obtain.
A few technicalities here: the camera only delivers 640 x 480 pixels, and the images are reported to be at 96 dpi (dots per inch), which means the images ought to be about 170 x 128 mm, but setting my simple software program to “actual size”, I get an image that is 200 x 150 mm on the screen. This is near enough, and it means that the images above show magnifications of x18 and x40, near enough.
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