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There's a nice toy out on the market that has great potential for a budding young scientist. A microscope with an LCD screen and price that shouldn't burn a hole in your pocket, yet powerful enough to allow for some semi-professional use as well. If you don't let the marketing department fool you, that is.

Bresser Digital LCD is a really nice piece of hardware. Built as sturdy piece of hardware and weighing in 1.5kg, it is not your ordinary plastic toy. What you get for about 200€ is a microscope, hard carrying case (to get the microscope out on the field where there's no electricity to power it), some already prepared slides to look at, shrimp hatchery to get your specimens and some microscope cutlery (toy grade, but usable), and there's even a handy tweezer microtome, to slice your specimens (fingers?), some glass slides and covers. You get no dies, but you get a bottle of gum media to fix your specimen on a glass slide.

Considering the price and the fact that you can actually do something useful with that stuff, this is a rich setup.

Let's focus on the microscope.

First of all, forget about the magnification range printed on the box. It doesn't compute. This microscope is an optical microscope with three revolving lenses: 4x, 10x and 40x combined with fixed 10x optical magnification for the camera, giving real magnification range of 40x, 100x and 400x. The enormous "up to 1600x" magnification is obtained by using digital magnification of the camera, but the results are, quite frankly, unusable. Even at low digital magnification the image is blurry, and at the highest setting you get a fuzzy cloud of colored shapes. That forces out magnificent magnification as advertised on the box and leaves you with still impressive up to 400x magnification. Or not?

We will review images later, let's examine the microscope further. The head of the microscope is a 3.5" LCD display. There's no option to mount an eyepiece or anything else for that matter. Don't be disappointed, it is the toy microscope we're reviewing, not a professional apparatus. The display itself is big enough for some serious viewing, although the whole setup is a little bit flaky. The buttons are hard to push and operating them temporarily distorts the image on the screen.

At higher magnifications the force needed to push the buttons shakes the microscope stage, causing movements of any loose object on it. The built in camera has 2 megapixel resolution, allowing snapshots in resolutions from 640x480 up to 2048x1536. You can even capture video at 320x240.

There's a trick using video capture mode to get the best focus. Since the microscope has to resample camera output to match the native 320x240 resolution of the LCD, the still image will always be somewhat blurry. To get the best focus, even if you're intended to make still photos, switch to video mode to get native 320x240 resolution which will produce sharper image on the display and let you find the best focus much more easily. Once you're satisfied with the placement and the focus of your specimen, switch back to picture mode and take a snapshot.

It will be saved in microscope's internal memory of 128MB; if that is not enough for you, there's a slot for SD card as well. The microscope will accept SD cards of up to 1GB. While you can preview/manipulate pictures and videos on the microscope, it is much easier to do so on a computer. You can connect microscope to your computer with USB cable and transfer files as if it is just another storage device. You can't use your PC to control the microscope, only to send and receive images and videos. The format for images is JPG, and videos are in 3GP format.

The camera is in range of consumer webcams, in fact that probably is just a consumer grade webcam crammed into the microscope case. It's got automatic white balance, which is good for a play, but not quite good if you're trying to get some unusual contrast. On the other hand, there are some built-in effects you can apply on the picture, such as black and white (useful), negative (good) and sepia (wtf).

Another very nice feature of the microscope is the ability to take snapshots at predetermined intervals, so you can watch a plant grow or a yeast on its way to conquer the world.

The stage is of impressively good quality for the price. It is very simple, but precise mechanical stage with Nonius scale, very easy to work with. Underneath the stage is one of two LED lights and a revolver with color filters. I have tried using them, but haven't really noticed the advertised ability to increase contrast in stained specimens. They're good if you like to watch your slides in multicolor, but don't expect much. The lighting system is simple, but good enough for this toy. There are two lights, one used to watch glass slides, and the other used to shed some light on 3D object you can put on the stage, giving you vastly more things to look at. There's a dimmer on the side of the microscope stand with marks ranging from 1 (low light) to 8 (brightest) . I have found out that the best lighting is between 6 and 7, depending on what you're looking at.

Last to describe is the microscope base. It's got two minor issues. The base itself isn't quite balanced and my microscope slightly tends to rock. I have solved that by simply placing piece of paper under one leg.

The focus knob is Ok for that price range, but it lacks fine focus, which would be handy, but on the second thought, for such a cheap microscope that focus knob is very good if you handle it very gently.

Now, on to the picture quality. Here I have some pictures made with this microscope: a prepared slide, and an 3D object – an EPROM. Those chips have handy windows, allowing us to peer inside and UV light to erase them. (no, really! You can really erase such chip by placing it under UV lamp or leaving it out on a sunny day). Also, note that there are full size images too. Displayed images are scaled to LCD size: 320x240.

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(full size image)

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(full size image)

The final verdict for Bresser LCD microscope is that it is an opportunity you shouldn't miss. Of course, you have to forget advertised digital zoom, it's useless. And you have to keep in mind that this microscope is barely more than a toy. But, what a toy! It isn't just for a junior to play biologist, this microscope can be used to do many useful things: checking your pets for parasites, checking the microorganisms in the soil, making interesting YouTube videos...

In a hands of an apt amateur, it's got unbeatable price/performance ratio and can be replacement for more expensive equipment.

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