3 ms·

Can anyone comment on the more technical optical properties of this instrument? How does it perform compared to a traditional microscope with the same magnifica

• twistedpair 12y ago
  I'm a dev, but got my degree in optical engineering not that long ago. The reason this is not news is that good microscopes cost money. Saying "hey, I've achieved 2100x magnication!" is pretty meaningless. Anyone who's ever used a nice camera can instantly realize the difference in the photos you get with a $500 Canon lens compared to that disposable camera you bought for $5. The pictures they've supplied are wonderfully blurry. Three cheers for poor light sources, spherical aberration and diffraction blur. If you're doing slides with results of great import, such as various health tests, you want an accurate image. We don't get to see any shots of optical calibration targets here, which would demonstrate just how poor the optics are. As a rule of thumb, anything over 1000x is usually poor and 1500x is considered the practical limit of optical microscopy (without some really expensive tricks like conjugate points and fluorescence which gets you a $100K+ kit). So yeah for cheap microscopes!, but I had a $5 one as a kid. Nothing new here. Plus, training people to properly prepare the slides and interpret the images correctly is a far larger problem. I've watch Harvard and other labs haul away truck loads of old equipment to the dumps. Let's send that to anyone in the 3rd world that wants it, but not waste too much time doing what's already been done.