Anyone know a place that sells one?
I found one online, but if anyone knows a place selling them, I’d rather pick it up today.
Guanghua 4th storey has a place that sells stuff like that. Woulda checked last night if I knew.
Another Tango-Wait you’re not Tango42! Oh well. Green Tea is still good. Topic still saved.
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I’ve seen a load of them on Shopee. I was thinking to buy one at some point. I feel like you’ll pay a fair bit more at a physical store/Guanghua for that kind of thing.
But if it has a usb-c adapter, you can test them in the store.
Edit- at least on most android phones
Yea I almost got sick of going to guanhua because the excitement of seeing a physical item is tempered by their 300% markup.
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I just got a cheap on front Amazon.
A couple years ago I bought an actual microscope – all of the USB ones I saw on Amazon aren’t actually microscopes, just cameras with macro lenses.
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Ah, I need it to take photos. It’s to take detailed photos of some fossils.
When I was at UT I just stuck the phone camera up to the eyepiece to take pictures of the slide… no special hardware needed, just a steady hand. Those are Leica microscopes costing more than 30,000 dollars.
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Yup, that’s what I do as well for microscope photos of hardware.
One colleague just bought a USB “microscope”, which is much more convenient. I’ll ask him later where he got it.
Honestly you are better off finding a cheap camera lens and mounting them backwards to use as “macro” than those cheap USB microscope.
Good optics costs money, and cheap optics is never good.
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Indeed, if you need very high magnification then probably cheap USB won’t cut it. @The_Ghost what do you plan to photograph?
In my special case we don’t need 100x or so - 10x is fine. For this, I don’t see much quality difference between the photos my colleague takes by cheap USB thingy, and me with my smartphone and microscope. If anything, his are better. Maybe also thanks to the crappy cheap microscope I use ^^
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A small dinosaur–possibly raptor–tooth which I want to ID. I need to do a serration count to get the exact species and someone online said a USB microscope would be fine (he’s a big-time collector of fossils, so I trust when he says just a cheap USB microscope will do the job)
It’s about 4mm long. I use a microscope app, which takes an OK photo–but a usb microscope will just give it that bit more clearer to get a positive ID.
You can take the lense out of an old dvd player/drive for a quick and dirty super-macro. I think it’s about 200x. I’ve done it
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wait … that’s a thing that works? Seriously?
Yep:
pepper
dish sponge:
pen:
I imagine these photos suck partly because it was 2014 and my cell phone was from before that. But yeah it’s not high quality. The main issue is the depth of field is so shallow that you can only get a small part in focus at once
Bluray lens would magnify more.
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You can just take a photo using any digital camera in macro mode. I guarantee it will look better than any cheap USB microscope out there.
Actually a hand lens would work for this too.
A hand lens I tried–and a magnifier app. It just couldn’t bring the detail up.
My photo with my hand-held magnifier
Guy on fossil forum using a pretty cheap USB microscope.
It just gives it that bit of clarity, especially on the serrations, which I can’t get with a handheld magnifier.
You can probably get it with macro mode on any camera…
Sorry nothing useful to report. He got it many years ago ago online…
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