"Fingertip Microscope" (for smart phone) - scam or real??

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! :woozy_face:
At least the video has nice music. :smile:

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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.

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A significant part of the cost of a real microscope (starting around 200 euro for student versions) is

  1. quality illumination (mostly LED these days),
  2. focus adjustment, including fine focus, with smooth mechanical knobs,
  3. 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.

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I must confess I hadn’t really considered that aspect - makes a lot of sense now!

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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.

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