https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/uchart/imicro-q3-a-fingertip-microscope-toward-the-optical-limit?ref=4kj8j3&utm_source=jellop&ja=z2aimakj&utm_medium=facebook&utm_id=fb&utm_term=001.ja&utm_content=iMicro_Q3-CL01
They claim to have produced large quantities of previous versions - but a quick search found 0 reviews… kind of interesting!
At least the video has nice music.
At the end of the video it says “Stable focusing control” while the control is done with a cardboard wedge.
Certainly not 1200x optical, a good deal of the announced 1200x is the size of the display vs the size of the sensor.
- On my phone (Pïxel7) the sensor diagonal is 12mm and the display is 16cm, so projecting the full sensor image to the display is already a 13.3x enlargement.
- Then the camera is 50Mpx and the display is 2.5Mpx so behind each display pixel there are 20 sensor pixel (so a square of 4.4 pixels on the side).
If you display pixel for pixel you have a 58.5 enlargement.
So their lens is a much more pedestrian 20x.
So is it real? Probably. Can it be used without adding a rig that is more expensive than a real microscope? That remains to be seen.
A significant part of the cost of a real microscope (starting around 200 euro for student versions) is
- quality illumination (mostly LED these days),
- focus adjustment, including fine focus, with smooth mechanical knobs,
- smooth 2d movement of the mechanical stage which holds the sample.
The optics are important, but without the rest, which is around 2-5kg of metal, it is pretty useless.
I must confess I hadn’t really considered that aspect - makes a lot of sense now!
For what it is worth I have put a compact camera up to the eyepiece of a real microscope and got pretty good images down the microscope. My Olympus TG6 has such close focus that it would be like a microscope, but the problem is illumination.