Product Description

The QX-5 Microscope is the perfect educational tool for children who want to learn about their world! Attach this electronic microscope to your PC and let children explore the tiny, hidden parts of their world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5844 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Prime Entertainment
• Model: QX5
• Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 3.25 pounds

Features

• Simply connect this microscope to any PC and watch as the tiny things are magnified to incredible size -- and displayed on your monitor
• Up to 200X magnification for seeing the tiniest particles and microbes, bigger than life
• Requires USB port

Amazon.com Description
Explore microscopic worlds at 10x, 60x, and 200x their original size with the Digital Blue QX5 Computer Microscope. This Microscope can capture and record images and video on most PC computers. Have fun experimenting with the microscope and the PC, and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. The microscope features 640x480 VGA resolution when streaming to PC, twin "Superbrite" LEDs for extra light, and 15-frame-per-second playback. Software features include measurement tools, drawing and painting tools, sound effects, special effects, text effects, and playback tools.

Computer system requirements are: Windows ME, 2000, XP, or Vista; 200MHz or faster processor, 32MB RAM, 150MB free hard disk space, SVGA 800x600 resolution video support (minimum 16-bit color), USB port enabled, 4x CD-ROM, Direct X8 (included at install). Mac OS X software for the QX5 sold separately. Digital Blue offers a 1-year limited warranty.

What's in the box:
QX5 Computer Microscope, USB cable, microscope stand, specimen jars, petri dishes, sample slide, tweezers, eye dropper, slide clip, software CD-ROM.

Customer Reviews

excellent piece of kit
The Qx5 microscope is the natural follow-on from the Qx3. Used as a toy with the "child friendly" supplied software, it will load onto the latest machines; difficulties with the old Qx3 software on Windows XP Pro were not encountered with the Qx5. I have found this software to be intensely irritating for my use, but letting my two young nephews loose on my computer I was delighted to find that the whizzes, zips and boings the program generates during its natural operation freed me to be elsewhere in the house without fear that my young guests had given up on the microscope and were trying to sabotage my machine in ways available only to the very young. Not that I need have feared: a simple walk around the local park produced more than enough samples to keep them delighted until dinner. An excellent Christmas game can also be knocked out with the Qx5 and a laptop by wandering around the house, taking magnified snaps of the decorations and furniture, then challenging guests to identify the objects. (Print thumbnails and you can have a dozen people wandering around different parts of the house peering at ornaments.)

However, I have not bought two new Qx5s to supplement the Qx3s I already have just to play games. These `toys' are truly excellent scientific instruments. They allow for rapid inspection of small components, provide good images for presentations, and an image of a graticule can be used to calibrate distance per pixel, providing simple distance and area measurement. These images can be fed to image-processing packages for colour-dependent area measurements and other techniques. Contact angles of droplets on surfaces can also be measured from these images, with the 60x magnification matching the best droplet size. The improved pixel count of the Qx5 gives markedly better resolution of crystal morphology and the more intense LED illumination at last makes 200x magnification generally workable. The rectangular grid of pixels on the old Qx3 has been corrected to a square grid meaning circles are now the same number of pixels across as they are high (rather than 10% fatter). They can be used to monitor and record movement because they collect movies as well as stills: with 15 frames per second (up from the Qx3's five) much faster events can be captured.

So what are the downsides? This is a souped-up Qx3, with a better webcam at one end and brighter light at the other, so in common with the Qx3 the optics are not perfectly matched. The focal plane for each magnification is therefore in a different position requiring re-focusing after every change, as well as producing occasional microscopes with one of their focal planes squeezed quite close to the microscope body. This can mean the plastic stand is at the limit of its movement and bouncing on the last tooth of the cog, or if you've built your own holder you may start bumping into the plastic shield around the light. The TWAIN driver is new, and has no light control, and there is no utility offered to control light separately from your Start Menu. It captures images on command, but then you have to select the image to pass it on to your graphics package - an unnecessary extra step for most applications. The automatic colour balance bleaches images of predominantly one colour, and with the bluish LED illumination, yellow seems to come off particularly badly. This is not true with the interface that opens for capturing movies, where all sorts of settings can come under the operator's control, but the driver (at least in XP Pro) is a Windows Driver Model (WDM) rather than Video For Windows (VFW), limiting your options to only more recent software, and the light is still not accessible.

Generally, however, I'm delighted with the improvements in image resolution and frames per second that the new camera and light offer, and for a price that seems lower than the Qx3 commanded until the very end of its commercial life, these `toys' are extremely good value for anyone who wants to peer at small things through the eye of the twenty-first century.

Fantastic!!
My son got this for his birthday and absolutely loved it. Immediately he was making movies and magnifying everything. He loves that it comes off the base to magnify just about anything that he can get close to the computer. He asked me if he could take it to school and share it with his class. His teacher loved that they could all gather around the computer and look at the images. It is even better in the classroom becasue she can verify that they are looking at the right things, and when students ask questions they can point to it on the computer screen instead of trying to explain what they are seeing through the regular lens. This is a great item for beginning to use a microscope and helping a child learn the ropes.

More than I hoped for
I bought this microscope to help introduce 'natural science' to my almost 3 year old. He had been playing a bit with toddler software but would lose interest. Since buying this (and we have to leave setup at all times!) my son is not only fascinated with looking at things (the stuff he wants to look at! dead earthworms, onion skin, leg from a dead spider, every feather) but his computer skills are really developing. He loves the software that comes with it (graphics type for 'art' and making your own movies) and handles it like a pro. The only fault with this is it did not include slides (for $90 you'd think they would include a few) - I am currently purchasing some - cool water experiments here we come (I think I have as much fun with this as my son!!)