Q-Scope QS.20200-P USB 2MP Digital Microscope

One of my graduate students extolled the wonders of the Dinolite--a hand held microscope camera--for capturing decent quality images of small things. In my case, the "small things" are microfossils a few 100 microns across (similar in size to table salt grains). A fancy Dinolite is $1000-$1300, so I hunted around to find something cheaper, which turned out to be the Q Scope (20200-P, 2 mp version) which is advertised to work with both Mac and PCs, and to take decent pictures up to 200X. Some of this turned out to be true, but not all. The Q-scope does not work at all with Mac iOS Catalina (I run version 10.15.5), so I tried it on an older Mac Book Pro running Sierra (iOS 10.9.5); the software does load on this older version of iOS, but the results are entirely unacceptable. The images are improperly interlaced at all magnifications, resulting in images that look like somebody has offset every other line of pixels--ie: a big FAIL. My 3 star rating is mostly because the unit does not work with Macs.So I then tried the Q-scope on a PC (an Acer laptop running Windows 10). The software download was harder than I expected, but when I did get it going, the Q-scope worked fairly well. The unit focuses at low magnification (~20x) with about 2.5 inches (~6 cm) working distance, and at 200x with the aperture of the camera resting on the object. Focus is continuous over ~20-40X, but then you have to spin the focus knob all the all to the final stop to get to 200x. The images are decent at all magnifications. At low magnification the camera is harder to keep in focus if it is not mounted on a stand, so hand-held images are often not perfectly in focus. At high magnification, you can manage decent pictures by holding the camera down on a flat surface before clicking the picture button on the device (or the camera button on the software). The polarizer is helpful for reducing glare on the subject. There are two degrees of lighting intensity on the switch on the camera, but you can also adjust the lighting brightness in the software. The software has basic things like a measurement calibration, the ability to annotate images, and rotating the image. I attach some images of the calibration card, where the lower magnification image is hand held, and the others were taken by placing the Q-scope directly over the calibration card. Note that in the lowest magnification image, the bight spot is created by the camera LEDs, even though I had the polarizer fully engaged. The other images had the clear plastic calibration sheet resting on the surface of my PC with the Q-scope pressed directly against it...My conclusion from all this, is that the Q-scope works decently, if you are used to the PC environment, and if your goal is to get images without the ability to do much with them in the software. The 2MP sensor is pretty good for getting images that are usable, but they do not have enough pixels to be enlarged much, and in any case, it is very hard to get images that are fully in focus such that you might want to make enlargements. I did buy a Dinolite (AM7915MZT ~$1200) for comparison, and that unit is much more capable (at 10x the price) but the image quality is not massively better despite its 5MP sensor. The same problems with getting sharp images pertain to the Dinolite as they do to the Q-scope. The Dinolite, on the other hand, does work reasonably well with my Macbook Pro for basic image capture and it is much more capable than the Q-scope in adjustments to the lighting, working distance, and ability to incorporate magnification scales in the images. The Dinolite also has a series of plastic attachments to the front of the microscope that can help do things like set a longer working distance, diffuse light in several ways (this turns out to be VERY useful), or block some of the LEDs to deepen shadows on the subject; the Q-scope has just a single clear plastic 'front-end' that helps set the working distance for the 200X magnification. The high-end Dinolites also do things like image stacking and sport 5 MP sensors; I had high hopes for both these features, but they turn out to be over-rated and do not have utility at high magnifications. The image stacking feature, for instance, automatically takes a series of images at different focal distances and stacks them to create a single (ideally) in-focus image, but this feature does not work for objects a few 100 microns across since the focal distance for successive images automatically selected by the software is much more than ~100 microns! The Q-scope is rather basic, as one might expect for a $130 item, and so is its software. For my part, I am going to buy a bunch of mid-range dinolites ($500-$800) with 3MP sensors and without image stacking since they are just much higher build quality than the Q-scope.

This is an interesting unit. Amscope has some very good products and this is a welcome addition. It can be a hand held scope, with 20-100X. The focus is readily done while in a single hand and the picture taken. The picture quality is exceptional. The software is not bad but after all we just need to capture.I found this useful in examining skin lesions, will not replace a dermascope, but it gives insight that can be quite useful. I would strongly recommend this unit. It works off a laptop and is highly flexible.