Product Description

MicroMax MM-100 60-100x Lighted Microscope

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #317 in Sports & Outdoors
• Color: Black
• Brand: Carson
• Model: MM-100
• Released on: 2005-05-01
• Dimensions: .13 pounds

Features

• Powerful 60x to 100x magnification microscope
• Extremely lightweight and portable design
• Built-in light provides a bright, clear image
• Rubberized eyepiece ensures comfortable viewing
• Fits easily into your pocket for portability

Amazon.com Description
The Carson MicroMax is a powerful 60x to 100x magnification microscope with an extremely lightweight and portable design. It features a built-in light that provides a bright, clear image. The rubberized eyepiece ensures comfortable viewing. The MicroMax also fits easily in your pocket so you can bring it along with you anywhere.

Customer Reviews

Great idea
This has become one of the highlights for people coming over to my apartment and hanging out. I keep it out on the coffee table and inevitably during the night someone picks it up and starts checking everything within reach using it.
It gives you a view you don't get to see normally without any fuss, just turn the knob to focus or zoom. It works well on nearly everything short of glossy objects and bright white objects. For the price, this is a great toy for the curious.

Useful toy you won't mind taking into the field
This little field microscope is a good bargain. Powerful enough to see details that can't be observed with the naked eye, light enough to take everywhere - maybe even backpacking, if you left the batteries out. Plus, it's cheap enough that you won't worry about taking it into the field.

Although toy-quality, the microscope is easily strong enough to use in plant and mineral identification. I have not tried mushroom spores, nor have I found a good way to use it for observing pond life. I would remove the batteries and bulb before attempting the latter!

The eyepiece is tiny, so you won't be taking decent photographs of anything with this microscope. However, the view through it is actually quite good. To give you an idea of the actual magnification of this thing (since other reviewers have said it's not 100x): At maximum magnification, something of about a millimeter in size will fill your field of view. The cells in the stem of a plant are easy to see, but the cells in leaves are only visible in some plants.

It's easy to focus, though the depth-of-field is not great. The picture is sharp and there are some hints that you can use to make it sharper.

1. For the best picture, don't rely on the tiny and suboptimally placed incandescent bulb that this microscope contains. It'll do when you don't have a free hand, but you can get a much better picture if you can hold and focus the microscope one-handed while shining light on your subject with a flashlight (LED works well) held in the other hand. This way, you can find angles that show details of the object that can't be seen with the incandescent. In particular, translucent objects (such as some minerals, many flower petals, and you) will not show up well under the included incandescent. Light such objects from farther away and at an angle. A brighter light going into the microscope also means a clearer picture coming out.

2. Remember that you can't focus beyond the clear plastic base of the microscope. Your subject must be at or above the bottom of the base. You can, however, pop the base off! Theoretically this is so you can change the bulb, but it's very useful if you want to look at something beneath a layer of glass, or into a crack on a surface. Don't just discard the base, though, because it *is* useful for holding the microscope steady.

3. Although there are other models of field microscope that are specially designed for slides and probably work better, you *can* use this like a slide microscope. You just need to provide a light source beneath the object. This is a good way to look at leaves, and is the only way you will see cells.

For all that it requires some tweaking to get optimal pictures, this is still a wonderful toy. It will open new worlds to explore and allow you to identify things in the field, and it costs very little. It's easy to use and difficult to break. I expect that to get something better, you would have to spend real money, and then you might not want to expose it to field conditions.

quite fun, but probably not 100x
this little microscope is quite fun... it can let you see paper tissue as long fiber, and see carbon particles on a paper printed out by a laser printer. for many printings, i can actually see the "pink" color as red background with lots of white circle dots, making the red look like pink. so it is a lot of fun. However, I don't think it can really magnify to 100x or 60x, because at 100x, we should be able to see dust mites with it. (some photos of dust mite were taken at 200x on some website). but i used this microscope to look here and there, and i never saw any moving object such as a dust mite.

(update: i actually compared the image seen with some 100 times image on the web for a dollar bill. they look similar. so it probably is good for 100x... just that i wonder why no dust mite or even just a "moving black dot" is seen with the scope.)