I've used many professional biological and mineralogical microscopes in the course of my career in the sciences and since retiring felt that I should have a decent quality microscope on hand for occasional use. I searched the Amazon offerings and found this item to have the features I desired along with the most reasonable price so I ordered it. After playing around with this microscope for a week or so after receiving it I must say I'm impressed with it's quality and ability despite its off-brand nature. The optics are very good, the mechanical stage works as smoothly as any I've used in my former work, images are bright and clear and the focusing mechanism is smooth and responsive. It's just what I was looking for. It happened to come with a small digital camera which mounts in one of the eyepiece sockets which I was not planning to use since its specs did not sound very good compared to those of my two Canon digital cameras which can use for microphotography, so to me that little camera was a throw-away item. On top of that, the software that came with it is Window-only and since I use Macintosh computers I figured it was useless for me anyway. Then, on a whim, I checked out what kind of free generic camera drivers might be available that might make it work on a Mac and lo and behold within a few minutes of googling around I found an application, downloaded it, and found out that it works just fine with that little camera! The images shown on the Mac screen, though not as good as those taken with one of my canon cameras, are really not bad at all and can be saved using the Grab application that comes with Macs. Then they can be manipulated in Photoshop or any other available image software I have. So now even that included camera is of some use to me since I can now use it as a means of showing visitors live images from the scope on my Mac screen. Pretty nice little unexpected bonus! So for anyone with a Mac that might like to use the camera that comes with the microscope, the free software to get for it is called Macam and is available at
Rick
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