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By D. hickson (Carlisle, Cumbria United Kingdom)
I bought this item to look at mosses and to be honest it is virtually useless for this purpose. It is much better to use a 20X hand lens or the natural history museum pocket microscope which is superb. At 20x the detail is very poor and the image dark and at 400x the image is barely in focus and the depth of field is almost none existent. A problem is that the focussing wheel is impossible to use without causing the microscope to move and making the object to be viewed impossible to keep located under the microscope. I cannot see how people can rate this highly and I cannot think of any uses that this microscope could be put to. Perhaps you could look at a fly's wing or newsprint, but the lack of depth of field means that it is impossible to view anything 3 dimensional especially at the higher magnification. There is no magnification between 20x and 400x. I plan to try to return the item. It cannot be used to view an object mounted on a slide because of the excessive movement caused when focussing which pushes down on the slide and moves the cover slip
By Mr. P. A. Barwick (uk)
Had it christmas have an old microscope which i compared it to its a shame the images couldnt be better than one megapixel i could use it for work then but its brilliant in that you can look at live obects without having to disect them i.e spiders flies noses and earholes the kids were amased at what was possible so for the money great and you can prettey much see as much detail as you would with a traditional microscope you also have a zoom facility giving you an overall picture and a zoomed in picture but the best feature in my opinion is you can view live objects without having to kill anything !!!!!
By S. G. Morley
I bought this item on the strength of some of the reviews above, and the fact that it was nearly half the listed price, it seemed like a bargain. Unfortunately I agree with all the negatives listed, and few of the positives. This is not a 400x microscope, maximum magnification is about to 20x and I get better photos from my three megapixel digital camera. There is no zoom, you zoom by "moving the microscope closer to the object", it only has a focus wheel. I never found the two focus areas one of the reviewers mentioned. The depth of field is really shallow which means that it is difficult to get items in focus, and the LED glare means that colours are bleached. The instructions are very poor, and I really didn't have the patience to try and work out the scale. The lighting is adjustable, but adjusting wheel broke almost immediately and now it is full on...or full on, which is too bright for shiny objects. The stand does not lock properly so it cannot hold focus, and slowly falls over. The video quality is not bad but the file size is very large and the format is not supported by any of my video editing software progs, so I cannot post the videos to you YouTube which was the whole point initially. I sent it back.
By R. Thomas (UK)
The advertising for this product is misleading. It does not offer a magnification range of 20 to 400 times. It only offers 20 or 400 times and no other magnifications. I emailed the Veho support centre to find out why the software did not appear to let me zoom digitally and their response was that I either had faulty software or incompatible PC. I downloaded the latest version of software but it is still not fully compatible with my Windows Vista Premium Sony VAIO laptop. The microscope stand has broken and it keeps slipping out of focus. I am so dissatisfied with the product and Veho's dismissive attitude to the problems that I would have already demanded a refund, if I were not too busy.
By middlea
I have just taken delivery of the VMS-004 microscope. It works (eventually). As with many other reviews (including those on the VMS-001) I have to say that the instructions are less than helpful, both on the installation and the use of the scope. I suspect my problems have been similar to those mentioned in the other reviews, so apologies if I repeat some comments. And some of my problems have been the usual ones arising from not fully reading the documentation that did exist (although I had to read between the lines on quite a few points).
My first attempt at installation ... having read the reviews I skipped the instruction in the skimpy Quick Start Guide to plug in the scope before installing, so (using the supplied disk) the driver installation stopped and said it couldn't find the device, please plug it in! So I plugged it in and all went OK.
Starting the Microcapture software and up came a preview screen that looks terrible at first, but twiddling the knurled silver wheel brought things into focus. BUT the magnification looked nothing like the 400x promised - more like 12x. Turning the wheel did not zoom (as implied by the scale shown on the device), it is a Focus wheel (as it calls it in the manual) and the meaning of the scale was not immediately apparent. The use of the wheel is simply to focus on objects at different distances from the nose of the scope.
Changing the preview size (initially set at 640x480) to anything above 640x480 hung the software - which with hindsight could be a memory problem on my machine.
Thinking I may have had a software problem, I removed the Digital Microscope driver and Microcapture (via the Control Panel in XP) and downloaded the 'latest' software from the Veho site, unpacked the Zip, ran Microcapture.exe (i.e. the menu shown in AutoRun.inf) and reinstalled the driver and software. The NEW manual does say NOT to plug in the device before the installation. I did the installation OK then plugged in the scope, and XP seemed to find the device and driver OK. BUT Microcapture now said it couldn't find the scope, though XP could see the device. I tried a few things, but gave up, uninstalled and reinstalled using the CD (thinking it was better to have low magnification than no magnification!).
THEN I FOUND SOMETHING. Keep turning the knurled knob to the extreme 'other' end of its movement (ignoring the 'direction' of the scale) and there is a second focus point (as I then recalled reading in a review somewhere)! I reckon the magnification of a subject placed at the end of the plastic tube (having removed the clear cap) looked like about x250 on the preview window - not the advertised x400, but pretty good. When you think about it, it is obvious that the 'magnification' depends on how much you blow up the image.
THEN I READ THE MANUAL BETTER. When you do focus on an object near the end of the clear tube, the scale gives you a 'notional' magnification. If you then capture an image and open it in the Microcapture software (double click on the thumbnail), you enter that number on the preview screen and using the measurement ruler will give you a fairly accurate measure of the object seem in the image. The actual 'magnification depends on things like the resolution of your screen. I reckon the x400 would really be x400 if the image was printed at about A4 or a bit bigger.
The two focus points effectively give you something like x400 at one end and x20 at the other - i.e. the advertised x20-x400 doen't mean x20 TO x400 but x20 AND/OR x400.
So the 'old' installation using the supplied CD seems to works - the software still seems to hang with higher preview sizes, but hey, I have a working microscope. The 'updated' software doesn't seem to work at all (on my machine). And as a PS on the new downloaded software, the 'Install me(tm) software' option is never explained in the (new) manual - it seems that its a peer-to-peer client for the Diino online storage facility - something I wouldn't touch without knowing more about it and I can't think that it is in any way necessary for using the scope.
There's a moral in all this somewhere, but I'm not a philosopher!!
And as a Postscript - the driver for the scope is a Twain driver and works in File>Import in Abobe Photoshop (VMUVC Twain Driver) - and in that context the higher resolutions work OK if a bit slowly.
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