What Microscope to Buy in 2023

what microscope should you buy in 2022 and beyond let's talk about it [Music] this video is brought to you by us micro safari did you know that we make a full sized museum exhibit version of the micro safari you can learn more at microsafari.org exhibit to test these microscopes out i'm going to use a couple samples here number one is a not so crisp 20 bill specifically we're going to be looking at the letters here that spell out secretary of the treasury so that you can get an idea of scale of what these microscopes are producing please note that i'm not going to be talking about magnification very much in this video at all especially for anything on this side of the table specifically because looking at magnification alone is a very misleading thing for new people that are getting into microscopy if you'd like to learn more you can check out my usb microscope live video our second sample we're going to look at is our micro safari product of course this is essentially a giant microscope slide that has thousands of live soil microorganisms in it such as springtails nematodes annelids that kind of thing you can pick this up at microsafari.org it makes a great gift the third sample we have here is this really smelly pond water with a lot of critters in it i'm going to put this onto a microscope slide and then put a cover slip on top of that and then use that as the test sample we're going to be giving out awards to these microscopes for each category we're going to give out an award for best value microscope best overall microscope and then best premium microscope as well some of these microscopes were provided to me for free to review by the microscope manufacturers i'm going to highlight them in red on screen now you've got a couple of categories of microscope to choose from on this side of the table we have all the digital microscopes the defining feature of this is that these microscopes have an image sensor in them that takes the image and then processes that and pushes it to a screen of some sort so that screen is either going to be on your smartphone using the mobile microscopes it is on the microscope itself or it's getting sent over to a computer via any usb cable or a monitor via an hdmi cable starting out with our mobile microscopes here when i was developing the micro safari platform i had to choose a microscope to include with our kit so i went on ebay specifically from china and i chose out the best smartphone microscope that i could find for this application and to do that i had to buy a variation of every single smartphone microscope that i could get my hands on oh boy there are a lot of smartphone microscope variations but i've done my homework so you don't have to and i figured out that this microscope right here was by far the best overall that i could find so this microscope right here wins the award for best value microscope and best overall microscope i chose this for our product specifically because it is the least gimmicky and the most robust and it doesn't have a super high magnification and this is important because when you're using your phone or any other handheld device as a microscope if your magnification is too high that means that any small amount of hand shake that you have is going to translate into the final image and you're not going to be able to hold the focal plane in long enough to actually get a good image on whatever you're trying to look at so this i mean and i found out this was kind of the downfall of most of the smartphone microscopes is that they were trying too hard to get high magnification because that's what sells these days but in reality you can see the vast majority of objects that you want to see with this thing i would say that i end up using this microscope about 30 of the time when i need to use a microscope to look at something you know i have the option to use this giant beefcake over here and i will often choose this instead because it's just far more convenient the little clamping mechanism is great because it will just slide over your camera on your phone you can slide it over really easy take it on or off super convenient you can just have this in your backpack it's really robust and durable has a built-in led and i tested the led and it ended up lasting for almost a week straight which is insane uh and by a week straight i mean you have to use this with the light on for a week straight it's nuts and this only comes in at i think about ten dollars these days so great deal on this and if you're looking to get your first foray into microscopy you might want to just start with the smartphone microscope or especially for kids or students because it's so inexpensive so reliable works great for that application and why do i not talk about what brand this thing is well as is the case with a lot of what we're seeing with chinese manufacturing there's some random factory that produces these things and they don't have a brand associated with them it's actually the white labeling companies that will buy these in bulk shipments and then distribute them around the world adding their own brand to it so essentially just look for the one that looks just like this i will include a link in the video description below so that you can see that microscope also quick shout out to the commenters who will tell me that i'm wrong for calling this a microscope to them i say that my definition of a microscope is any optical device whose sole purpose is to magnify objects which are not only invisible to the naked human eye but also will make objects viewable that are typically measured in microns that satisfies both of those characteristics second one that i want to give the premium award to is this tiny scope microscope this thing is really interesting and is very different from the other smartphone microscopes that i've seen essentially the distinguishing factor of this thing is that number one it has a really high magnification not only does it have a really high magnification but it's also very good image quality there's very low aberrations and overall it's just crisp and very sharp the other interesting thing that it does is that number one you have to stick it on to your camera using this double-sided adhesive tape it does come with some extras but there's an added layer of inconvenience there whereas you know i like this microscope so much because you can just slip it on and off super easily whereas this you have to stick it and unstick it and really align it just perfectly but an interesting feature that they added onto this is that the way it illuminates a sample is that it uses your phone's actual flashlight and it hits this light pipe and it pipes it over to this little donut around the lens itself to illuminate your samples the other problem that i have with this tiny scope is that it requires an extremely close working distance so whatever you're looking at it has to be right up against the sample otherwise it won't work whatsoever if you're looking at something on a microscope slide with a cover slip that works perfectly in fact they designed it to specifically so you could just place it right up against a cover slip but that really limits what you can actually look at with this microscope because of well the high magnification and because the working distance is so short for the best premium mobile microscope in this category i'm a little bit torn between giving it to this andenstar mobile microscope which has a screen already on it it's not a smartphone microscope the build quality of this thing is is very solid but what i would have really like to see from anonstar is for them to include a stand with this that way you can place it and use it as a very good microscope alternative i mean this is essentially the same quality as one of these if it had a stand but again the problem with the handshake goes to this as well and if you're trying to hold it and you're trying to twiddle the knobs to get everything in focus you're going to be moving this thing around and it just doesn't just doesn't work that great other than that it is a pretty nice microscope build quality is good image quality is great by the way they did send this to me for free but hopefully i'm not too biased here since i am hating on it moving on to our digital microscopes this is the category of microscope that we're seeing the most technological improvement in the last couple years specifically the image sensors are getting better and better along with the processors that actually make these image sensors work as well that led technology has enabled low power illumination for these microscopes which mean that some of them are battery powered these days as well for the best value microscope in this category i'm going to give it to this one right here even though i extensively hated on it in my usb microscope live video for 20 dollars it's hard to beat how the function that you get for such a low cost the problems with this microscope are number one that it claims to have an obscenely high magnification 1600x which is the theoretical limit of optical microscopes obviously this thing does not get 1600x and i proved that in my video titled the usb like microscope lie the other major problem with this microscope is that the stand itself is very flimsy you know the problem being that if you're trying to look at an image or an object with it and you're trying to turn the the focus knob here you know the entire microscope moves when you do that and when you're at high magnifications any small motion of the microscope if you can see the microscope moving at all that means on the final image you're going to see a huge movement so trying to get an image and actually have it in focused and looking good all the time is really challenging that being said again it's hard to beat twenty dollars there's also a limitation here with it being just usb 2.0 be aware that any usb microscope that you get that is just regular black on the inside usb 2.0 is going to have a limitation on how much data it can send to the computer i believe that is 720p worth of bitrate there so that's going to be a challenge with any of those if you want to get full hd viewing on a microscope you are going to need to upgrade to a microscope that is either blue on the inside because that means that it is usb 3.0 or you're going to need to get an hdmi microscope or one of the microscopes that have these screens on them these screens are as far as i know all actually 1080p screens so the resolution is basically as good as your phone's screen i would also like to give the best value microscope to this microscope here this andenstar microscope was sent to me for free and i was pretty impressed with what it can do for i believe it was 60 somewhere around there on amazon most impressive thing about this is that it's a very rigid stand even though it's all plastic i don't know how they did it but this thing does not move around in fact it's it's actually more rigid than this aluminum stand that was also sent to me the other really nice thing about this microscope is that it also has transmitted light illumination so if you wanted to look at pond water samples for fun maybe look at microscopic animals or some really big amoebas or protists this will be able to do that and overall just a pretty solid microscope i don't really have any major complaints with it especially for the price point the fact that this has gooseneck lights on it is a huge bonus so that is extremely important if you're trying to look at any sort of sample that is reflective at all so that could be rocks minerals that could be coins even the micro safari itself because it's acrylic on the top side you're gonna get glare if so for example on on this microscope here the light either is coming up through the sample or there are little leds right next to the objective and when that shines down onto a reflective sample it's going to create glare and your image is going to not look very good at all whereas if you have gooseneck lights you can adjust them to wherever you need them to be other great feature of this microscope it is in fact battery powered i tested this and it was able to last for about one hour recording video and with its battery life which is honestly pretty great another quirky feature that is maybe unnecessary but pretty cool it has touch sensitive dimmable led illumination very fancy very unnecessarily fancy but i'm here for it things that i don't like about this microscope are that number one this aluminum stand is not quite as rigid as i would like it to be i'm a sucker for good mechanical build quality on a microscope and the the turning knob is a really stiff it's not quite as buttery smooth as this andenstar one oh that that one feels nice and then in addition to that you know just the rigidity of the stand is not exactly where i would hope it would be um as well as the gooseneck lights also don't really stay in place where you want them to they have a little bit more spring back than you would like but small problems um for the price of the microscope it has a lot of functionality baked into it and sorry to say it and start i think i'm gonna start using this mosue as my daily driver that being said i do still use this and star microscope inside of my museum exhibit that i build the micro safari museum exhibit reason being is that i have tested this for a very long time this has been running for years straight inside of the museum exhibit and then just the mechanical build quality is solid enough that i know that you know kids shaking the exhibit the focus is not going to change um in this barrel it's all going to just stay there and be good for the long term this microscope down here i want to talk about a little it's an interesting microscope it is an am scope microscope the quirk here is that it's on this rotatable positionable arm so you can set it if you want to look at something that is vertically positioned you can do that sounds really good on paper but as it turns out it's extremely rare that you need to look at something that you have to position the microscope in a weird way for if you're doing some industrial application this might be a little bit more useful for me i've basically never used that functionality from it and it's ended up being it's just more inconvenient to try and get the right focal distance for this microscope so this one's hdmi this one's hdmi and this one's hdmi so these are all going to give you the best image quality if you want to take it to an external monitor and then this one is not hdmi i believe you can get the signal out via usb but the screen on it is really the good part about this microscope i end up using digital microscopes where i would say about 60-ish percent of what i'm trying to look at on you know a weekly basis so something common that i might look at is for example if i am building out a new prototype of the micro safari kit and i need some kind of a breathable membrane material that is gas exchange for the organisms and i need to identify what kind of plastic it's made of i'll use my digital microscopes because they're so fast to set up and give plenty of magnification for for most of my applications and i can just put it under there figure out okay is it a woven fabric is it non-woven is it flash spun you know whatever i need to figure out with that what's that you really want to look at pond water samples and tardigrades under the microscope okay i get it for that kind of thing you definitely need to start looking at these compound light microscopes specifically the defining feature of these is that they have these multiple objectives here that have varying magnification levels and they are typically transmitted light illumination which is very important for samples that are extremely small and samples that are then also extremely transparent so like a water bear for example is an extremely small organism and it is completely invisible if you're using transmitted light so even if one of these microscopes could zoom in enough to see them they you wouldn't necessarily even be able to see it at all because they're so transparent so in this category i'm gonna go ahead and give this swift microscope the best value option i was pretty impressed with this thing at sixty dollars it's it's they've essentially spent the money in good places so to speak so they've they've cheaped out on certain components there are things that are just simply missing from this microscope which you would find in a slightly more expensive microscope but the most important things those being image quality of the objectives and a good z-axis uh platform the actual stage itself is quite good on this so the the way that they've cheaped out here is that they are not including a condenser lens like you would find in a little bit better of a microscope they instead have this rotating wheel that has different apertures on it to adjust the amount of light throughput on your sample and they have a no mechanical stage as well so this is an issue when you are looking at objects under very high magnification if you're having to manually move the microscope slide with your hands even the smallest possible movement you could do with your hands is going to look like it's just raging across the screen under a microscope that's why mechanical stages are so important at high magnifications speaking of high magnifications this thing can go up to a thousand times magnification which is definitely enough to start seeing bacteria the theoretical limit of optical microscopes is 1600x for reference the only issue here is that the on the highest magnification objective here you start getting significantly more aberrations and the image quality isn't supreme but for a 60 dollar microscope it's pretty good other features that i like out of this is that it does come with a transmitted light sorry reflected light option as well and this whole thing is battery powered so very very handy in that regard but the trans the reflected light and transmitted light combo well it can't actually be done at the same time you can't shine both lights at the same time i wish you could but that being said if you have since you have reflected light now you can look at a much wider variety of samples the biggest limitation with these style of traditional compound microscopes is that your sample needs to be extremely thin and transparent so for example even fabric like an opaque fabric you can't really see that using transmitted light microscopy very well at all and i mean from my experience the vast majority of objects that i look at are better looked at under reflected light microscopy than than transmitted light but very specifically if you're looking at bacteria water samples if you're looking at tissue samples where you have to slice like for you know this can be mammalian tissues or it can be plant tissues let's just say plant tissues for now you'd have to take the the plant sample and and slice off extremely thin sections put that on a microscope slide slap that down put a cover slip on top of it and make sure that that slice is extremely extremely flat and consistent otherwise the focal plane is going to be all over the place you know the just fundamentally the higher in magnification you go the smaller and smaller that depth of field becomes and that's why it becomes more and more critical to start having these super rigid frames comes more and more critical to have really really fine resolution z axis stage control and what have you so moving on from this microscope this this amscope microscope was the first microscope that i ever got in my foray into microscopy i am glad that i got this microscope in hindsight i as a beginner i probably would have actually preferred this microscope but that being said this was a good base to start on because it has some of the i guess more technological features that you'd get in a microscope like this so it has the condenser lens which is important if you want to start you know fooling around with doing dark field other custom modifications to your microscope to do more advanced techniques you will need a little bit more of a traditional condenser lens setup there it also does have the mechanical stage which is very important especially because this microscope does actually go up to 1600 x magnification one of its objectives is an oil immersion lens which for educational purposes is very useful to just have you know the full kind of spectrum of features that you can get even on you know more high-end microscopes so best value and best overall i'm actually going to give to this swift microscope and best premium microscope i'm going to give it to this am scope microscope i'm not giving the premium microscope award to this giant chunky boy over here because i highly doubt that most people are going to want to buy or you know even can buy a microscope necessarily that this expensive the only reason that i'm able to have this microscope is because i got it i found it in a dusty basement and i got it super super cheap medical surplus but i will talk more about this at the end of the video because it has a lot of really interesting features to it this is a stereo microscope a relatively low magnification microscope which is typically good for things such as soldering jewelry making biological dissections electronics inspection anything that you have to physically manipulate under the microscope and you need good magnification to actually see what you're doing the primary advantage of this microscope is that number one it's relatively low power or low magnification which seems like a bad thing but in reality you need to match your magnification to what you're actually doing and the flip side of that is that by having a lower magnification you get this really long working distance meaning that the focal plane of what is in focus under the microscope is relatively far away from the bottom of the objective itself and so this gives you just a lot of practical room to be able to do manipulations in addition to that the depth of field of these lower magnification microscopes is typically a lot bigger in addition to that because you have two of these eyepieces here you get stereoscopic vision meaning that you actually have three-dimensional vision under a microscope which is sort of a trip when you see it for the first time my number one tip for buying one of these microscopes is to not get too high of a magnification i actually made this mistake when i was buying this microscope for the maker space that i helped to build it usually will end up being that about 30 to 40 times optical magnification is what you want to be looking for i opted to get the closer to 90 times magnification microscope and that was a huge mistake this particular microscope that we got is a relatively more expensive model from amscope particularly the expense comes from it being able to swivel in all these directions be able to go in and out but you don't necessarily need all this ultra fancy functionality from for most work in fact if i was going to buy one of these for myself i would get a unit that is just on a single stand that you can't move around at all because that will decrease the price that you're paying into a really beefy extravagant stand and the price that you're paying into the microscope is actually going into quality of optics as an example i would also recommend that you shy away from getting the stereo microscopes that have a positionable arm which i'll put a picture of on screen because there's too much vibration in the setup anytime you touch it or move the table you'll see your entire field of view just rocking around all over the place so what's the deal on these mega chunky microscopes here well these are zeiss axio imager m1 microscopes the defining feature of why these are so fancy is that almost everything on the microscope is motorized so for example you know you twiddle these knobs over here and it moves the stage like you would expect but normally it's just it's a direct mechanical connection but in this case it's actually you're turning a sensor specifically a rotary encoder and that sends a signal to a stepper motor driver and then this is actually motorized separately you can't be having any of that human imprecision they take the human out of the equation by making it seem like you're moving it directly but you're actually not then even beyond that it has a touch screen of course on the touch screen you can change it to a different objective manually it'll lower the stage change the objective and raise the stage back to find the correct focal height for it very fancy these microscopes are typically used for industrial applications that require some kind of highly automated process so the the way that i actually cut these into my possession is that i was at a local non-profit it was specifically the local hacker space and i found in their basement there was a cabinet that was just full of these microscopes so i was like uh what the heck like where did all these come from so i talked to some folks found out that it was a large medical supply company that had these with a project that had uh failed and they wanted to get a tax write-off so they donated them all to this local non-profit originally these were hundred thousand dollar microscopes each that's what i've heard at least i obviously did not buy it for that much from the non-profit i bought it for far far far less than that and in fact there are more of these that are available so if you are interested in one of these research grade microscopes the starting price is at two thousand dollars please send me a message at microsafari.org if you are interested and i'll get you in touch with the folks at that nonprofit that have more of these microscopes they come as as is part of the you know deal here is that they're they need a lot of cleaning and they need some upgrading so this has actually been kind of a fun project for me upgrading this microscope finding new components for it making some of my own custom components this one here is mine this one i'm just borrowing from that non-profit so that i could make this video to show you one of the vanilla versions of this microscope so some of the uh you know best parts of the microscope are number one the optical train is extremely good uh the this is this is what i use to film my like welcome to the micro safari videos any other microscope related videos typically using this i put my my mirrorless camera up top here these are made to be universal microscopes meaning that there are all of these ports and little areas that you can take out to add filters you can turn this into basically any kind of microscope that you could want you could turn this into a differential interference microscope phase contrast fluorescence microscopy you could do polarization you can do dark field obviously you know bright field any anything you can dream of you can do with these things so some of the modifications i made for this microscope setup are that number one i made a custom xy motorized stage that is specifically designed to house one of my standard micro safari cartridge sizes so that slips in over here like so and now it's on a motorized stage obviously i can't run it because all the wires are unplugged at the moment but you get the idea i also added some of these machining armatures here so that i could add in my own illumination sources so this is a an ultraviolet flashlight so i'm doing my own kind of diy reflected light fluorescence microscopy i also had another one coming out here that was doing just standard visible light i guess that's really all the modifications i've made to it so far but i have more future plans on the way perhaps utilizing the motorized aspect of it specifically that with these motor setups you could for example take a not crisp 20 bill and you could take photos tiny tiny photos of each little location on the dollar bill and then stitch those together in software to make like a 20 million megapixel photo of a 20 bill that's been something i've been interested in doing but uh i have projects that are more important to me at this point so we also have a bunch of high-end zeiss objectives that come off these microscopes which you can also buy separately if you would like to as well reach out to me microsafari.org the final award for my new all-time favorite microscope drumroll please is this moisiway microscope i it's it's quirky which is good mechanically it's not ideal but otherwise it makes up for it in good image quality so definitely recommending this one i thank you mozue for sending me a surprisingly good microscope maybe i shouldn't be that surprised if they if they're sending it over to me they know that it's going to be good enough that i'm going to like it so yeah thanks again [Music]

Channel: Micro Safari

Views: 350,956

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Id: zKUYf4QLh1s

Length: 30min 48sec (1848 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022