Veho Discovery DX-2 USB Digital Microscope | 5 Mega Pixels | x300 Magnification | Photo/Video Capture & Recording | Up to 2592 x 1944 Resolution | 8 LED's | Adjustable Stand (VMS-007-DX2)

I took this and a rugged (2goPC) netbook on a 5 day Geology Field trip. I stored the microscope in a soft cloth bag inside a Nalgene water bottle. This way, I can keep the microscope in my day pack, and not worry about damaging it. The base does not fit into the water bottle, so I detach it and store it separate. The body is pretty rugged, and the lens and LEDs are recessed. The place I'd expect a failure, would be where the USB cable enters the body of the microscope. Be careful you don't kink the cable here.It seems to have two focal lengths related to distance from the object. One at about 10x, the other about 400x. It's great for looking at grain structures of rock samples. The rocks I had were not going to come home on the airplane, but I have close up pics, and pics of friends rocks too. The internal LED lights make this easy to use.When you've collected a pic, look at the magnification on the body of the microscope. Double click on the picture on the side-bar of the microscope software. When the picture opens up in the picture editor, enter the magnification into the box provided in the upper right corner of the picture editor. Now, you can use the software measurement tool in the picture editor to measure structures (and save the measurements) on the picture. Be sure you save the picture to your "My Pictures" folder.My son found a small but very ugly bug, the microscope software has video capture capability, and we were able to capture a video of the bug (turned over) trying to right himself.My son also took some really cool pictures of candy wrappers and pea-cock feathers at 400x.The actual lens is shielded by the outer clear plastic ring, and it's easy to just press the microscope against your object to view, focus, snap a pic. I don't use the base stand much. After a few tries, you can operate the microscope with one hand. There is a button to capture a picture, or click on the PC.The only down-side I have, is the lens cap does not fit tightly. I plan to add a thin bead of silicon sealer to the edge of the lens cap. But I'm glad that the lens cap does have an eye for a string to tie it to something.

Paul gave a very good review of the product and a great mini-lesson on how to use it.It is a great little toy to play with and is a lot of fun. However, I am a teacher and had hoped to use it in a more serious manner in the classroom. I liked the idea of being able to make on-screen measurements and unfortunately, that is the most lacking feature of the product. With my version of software, I am able to enter in a magnification of 400 while making measurements. It was pretty accurate showing .97 mm for one tic mark on a ruler. I know my degree of accuracy in drawing the line was certainly not within .03 mm so I am happy with the results. The reason I am rating it a 3 is simply because of the difficulty in this measurement process. Because the measurements can only be made at 0 distance (i.e. the object at 0 distance from the end of the clear plastic ring) it limits the types of measurements that can be made. For example the field of view at x20 is about 13mm as Paul points out. If I want to take a picture of anything bigger than a dime (or even a dime) I can't do so because a dime is 18 mm in diameter and won't fit in the field of view. If I back off a little bit and refocus, I can get an entire dime in the image, but then I have no means of determining the actual magnification ratio. Because this limits my use in a school lab setting, other than just capturing images and video which in itself is useful, I rate it down to a three. In all fairness, I don't know the capabilities of competing products such as the high priced pro-scope so they may all work this way.Another issue is the funky stand that comes with it. It is too short and inflexible to be useful. It really needs to be twice as long as it is with a second joint between the two arm segments. This would allow the user to actually position it in usable positions. A snake type stand would be better and I am looking for a trashed desk lamp to convert it into a stand. The base of the stand also needs to be weighted more heavily to keep the scope upright.This is a fun scope to play with but these issues are really aggravating and take away from the true utility of the scope. It is a shame that Veho didn't take the extra step to make the zoom actually work and to make the stand more robust. It couldn't have added another $5 or $10 to the price of the product which I would have gladly paid to get a truly useful product.For now, it is fun to play with and I am looking forward to the next generation of USB products.

I have been looking at several of these and reading reviews. This week a consultant was here and we used one of these that he brought with him to analyze diesel fuel and particles in it. After a couple of dozen analysis, snapping pictures of the results while we showed them to the group on screen, I placed an order for my own.We actually did not use the stand. It worked well sitting directly on top of the membrane with the particles in them (covered with a plastic film).Wherever we went, we just plugged it in and slid it around the membrane to show the particles, mostly in the 1 to 40 micron range.Here are a couple of pics of samples just with the macro on a normal digital camera, plus additional pictures taken through the microscope. [...]Mine came and it is great. I can see why people comment on the stand, but I don't use it. People are amazed at how dirty their fuel is.The mini disc with the software doesn't fit in my computer, but instead of downloading the software I just put it on the network and dragged the Mac folder to my applications folder. After clicking to take pictures, I can drag them into iPhoto, name them, etc.Videos are AVI, so they are huge, but of course can be compressed.