Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Celestron Digital Microscope Pro does what it says, more or less. It puts a picture of small things on your monitor. The image quality of the camera is good. It comes with all the parts they promise. You might be able to get work done with it. But it fell short of my expectations. I paid a premium price to get a brand name product with domestic support instead of a Chinese import of unknown quality. I was disappointed by the value-for-money. The fit and finish of the components were unremarkable, neither fragile nor particularly robust. Focusing the microscope is a three-part chore; adjust the height of the arm on the stand to obtain an approximate zoom, use the fine-adjustment knob to obtain a fine zoom or sharpen the focus, adjust the focus ring on the camera to obtain sharp focus. This is fine for low magnification tasks like inspection, but very fiddly for high magnification. I found that the stand/arm/camera system was not rigid enough to reliably support focusing at high magnification. The camera is easily removed from the stand to hold in your hand. But it's impossible to maintain an accurate focus in your hand. If you replace the camera in its stand, you must re-align its axis so your subject is right side up on the monitor. The software is laggy enough to make this challenging. If you adjust the stand height/zoom, or the camera slips in the stand (like when you're using the focusing ring), you must recalibrate the magnification to do measurement. The measurement function is thus pretty much a toy. The ring of LEDs around the lens illuminates the visual field at high magnification, but at low magnification, it puts dots of light on the subject, with very strong reflection if the subject is shiny, like the calibration sheet is. The calibration sheet itself is a small piece of flimsy plastic. There is no place on the microscope to store the calibration sheet. I'm sure it will be gone a week from now. The vertical tube of the stand is not long enough to allow the camera to focus over the full range of which it is capable. With the camera at the top of the stand, the visual field is about 2.5 x 1.5 cm, which is small for inspecting electronic circuits. The end of the camera is only about 5 cm above the stand; too close to work under. The camera will focus out to a greater distance than this, but it won't focus to infinity like some other USB microscopes. I made a longer stand tube that fit into the base. The maximum focusing distance was about 18 cm, which extended the field of view to around 5 x 3 cm. Look at the product photo and understand that the maximum field of view is considerably smaller than the stand. The software that comes with the microscope is unremarkable. Its only functions are to provude a real-time display, capture still photos or brief videos, plus measurement of previously taken photos. It functions reliably on my Win7 PC, though the installation claimed to fail every time. Other reviewers have reported problems with the software. I bought the microscope for low-magnification inspection work at home. I'm not sure whether it will stay on my desk or get stuffed in a dark corner (a year+ later, it's in a dark corner). It's possible that there are some medium-magnification tasks for which this product is better suited. However, for my use, the combination of difficult focusing, narrow field of view, poor lighting, and cheap software make the Celestron Digital Microscope Pro basically a toy.