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HankR
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Joined: 02/01/2015
Location: United States
Posts: 209

Posted: 05:03pm 02 Sep 2017

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Any thoughts on acquiring a mono microscope whose lowest of three powers is 10X?
Has 3 lens turret.

It's much less costly than the binoc ones and is used.

I wouldn't have to be concerned with alignment of the left and right sides.

Hank

Alastair
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Joined: 03/04/2017
Location: Australia
Posts: 161

Posted: 05:55pm 02 Sep 2017

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Hank,
I think the field of view would be a limiting factor plus they are usually designed to have the lens very close to the object.

Cheers, Alastair

HankR
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Joined: 02/01/2015
Location: United States
Posts: 209

Posted: 08:32pm 02 Sep 2017

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Alastair said
I think the field of view would be a limiting factor plus they are usually designed to have the lens very close to the object.

That's what I thought. A bit of wishful thinking going on there.

I don't know why there's hardly such a thing as a low power inspection microscope that is not binocular.

Looking at the AmScope offerings I see around $170 where boom mounted scopes start to appear, the working distance is a whopping 9 inches (228 mm), compared to ~2 inches (53mm) for the under $170, non-boom scopes. Pretty impressive; tons of working space for sure.

circuit
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Joined: 10/01/2016
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 232

Posted: 12:19am 03 Sep 2017

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Binocular vision is the way to go; working flat-field with one lens is very restricting. If cost is the issue then you would probably be better off with a very large magnifying glass (the type with a ring-light around the lens and on a flexible arm) or with visor-mounted loupes.

paceman
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Joined: 07/10/2011
Location: Australia
Posts: 1329

Posted: 12:54am 03 Sep 2017

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HankR said Looking at the AmScope offerings I see around $170 where boom mounted scopes start to appear, the working distance is a whopping 9 inches (228 mm), compared to ~2 inches (53mm) for the under $170, non-boom scopes. Pretty impressive; tons of working space for sure.

Hank, I think you'd find that the 9" working distance does not mean that you've got 9" between the lens and the focal point - it's much more likely to mean the amount of room under the boom that you have to maneuver a specimen. Focal distance and working distance are not the same.

I spent a lot of years using lots of different microscopes and the stereo scope is what you want. Field of view much bigger, depth of field much better and 'stereo' vision is much better than standard single lens when you're manipulating things. Don't worry about having to adjust the two lenses. The objective lenses (closest to sample) are fixed and adjusting the eyepiece lenses is the same as you do with ordinary binoculars.

Greg

Boppa
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Joined: 08/11/2016
Location: Australia
Posts: 814

Posted: 02:22pm 03 Sep 2017

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I found the monocular scopes (and the ring magnifiers) a bit awkward to use as they didnt give you any depth perception- after a while I became more used to it, but still preferred my binoscope for the smd stuff. The other option is the headset magnifiers with the variable magnifications (by flipping down a series of lenses).They work ok for the bigger stuff, but again for the IC's etc, the binocular scope ruled
Also, get the biggest LED lights you can- the brighter the bench the better- my old boss used to complain he needed sunnies to come near my bench, but I found that going from a single 40w fluro to 6 led `floodlights' I actually ended up at the end of the day with far less eyestrain (I was soldering around 20000 joints a day....uggh)

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