Ryan

[Ryan]

The resolution of your screen shouldn’t effect your magnification. I have the same set-up: an old Dell laptop with XP and a 17″ non-HD monitor. My Celestron software allows me to capture an image, then, having calibrated the software to a known reference (they supply a little scale graduated in 1/16″ or 0.5mm), you can measure the distance between any two points (or radii) as you would in a CAD program. You can zoom in on a very small part of the image and measure very accurately. You can measure in inches, mm or camera pixels.

My microscope’s software doesn’t give you any calibration or scale. And you set whatever capture resolution you want in the software. Even though the cmos sensor obviously has a fixed, and fairly low resolution.

Even if the software does give you a scale, it’s not going to change the fact that different size displays will give you different magnification ‘values’ when calculated based on display / realsize. For example, my phone has a resolution of 1920×1080 on a screen that’s about 5 inches. Lets say your microscope gives you a true 1920×1080 resolution file. Lets also say the microscope captures an area a total of 0.050 inches across. 5 / 0.050 gives a magnification of 100x.

But lets say you’re doing a presentation, and you have the same 1920×1080 resolution file on an HD projector that’s projecting onto a 10 foot screen. Now your magnification is 120 inches / 0.050 = 2400x.

Both are ‘correct’. But the source file only has so many pixels. So this is basically a form of digital zoom. The projector example is the rough equivalent of ‘zooming in’ on your image viewing software on your pc. Or my microscopes software letting me capture to basically any size image I want when the sensor is really only good for about 640×480.

I’m mainly saying the stated 400x magnification of the veho is inflated. The software can up-sample the image, or I can zoom in digitally and make the display image bigger, therefore more magification, but the quality just isn’t there. Maintaining a sharp picture requires relatively low resolutions and therefore smaller display resolutions. This is how I get the 137x mag I stated previously.

[Ryan]

Yea, I haven’t even been using the 100/200 grit stones. I re beveled the side that was 26 to 22 with the 400 stone.

As far as the scale, yes I guess that would work. But it would be resolution dependent. And also monitor DPI (more technically ppi, pixels per inch) dependent. For example, I have an old laptop with a 15″ screen that runs at 1600×1200. Compared to my 24″ monitor that is also 1200 pixels high. Measuring the distance on one compared to the other will result in different magnification values.

One thing I did do was calculate the approximate width of the actual apex. I have a set of calipers that tell me the widest part of the bevel (which you can see in the photo’s) is right around 0.020 inches. Converting that to Metric (mm), and taking the width of the bevel in pixels compared to the width of the apex in pixels gave me an apex of 7-8 microns if I remember right.

Using the bevels width, I can also calculate that on my monitor here, I’m seeing 275x magnification (5.5 inches / 0.020 inches).

But all that is assuming the microscope actually has the optical resolution to provide a picture that’s 1280×960. Which I don’t this this does. I’ve read the native optical resolution is more like 640×480. Which would about half the magnification to 137x or so.

Been thinking about getting one of the dino lite’s. I’ve seen the awesome pictures Clay gets from his.

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