AmScope 40X-2500X LED Digital Monocular Compound Microscope with 3D Stage (M620C)

This was an upgrade from a Swift SW200DL microscope I bought which was very good and half the price of this one, but I wanted something a little fancier. I am a hobbyist who once majored in chemistry. This microscope has several pro features the other one didn’t have. It comes with better quality objective lenses than most other inexpensive microscopes here on Amazon, and there are four instead of three which is very nice to have. It’s a little inconvenient to have to plug it in but it is brighter than a battery-powered illuminator and this is necessary when you go to higher powers of magnification. It came with a wider-angle 10x eyepiece than the cheaper microscope, although the quality of the image is no different. The X-Y adjustment for slides is nice to have at high magnification and is something all pro devices have, but it is also a bit more awkward to insert and remove slides compared to a simple platform with clips. The Abbe condenser isn’t the game-changer I had hoped it would be but with its iris diaphragm you do have more control over the light. I keep both the diaphragm and the height of the condenser lens nearly at their maximum settings all the time, which seems to make having such adjustments almost unnecessary. I have found using the 1000X oil immersion objective to be a bit of a problem. As far as I can tell it’s not the microscope’s fault that with most of the Lakwar prepared slides I have I cannot get close enough in to focus on the subject. The glass stops any further forward motion of the objective lens and focus is not achieved. For some reason I can get close enough with maybe only one in ten of these slides to achieve good focus, and on those the results are pretty amazing. I believe that some of the better prepared slide sets like those made by Premiere have thinner cover glass because I’m getting better results from those. At 1000X the focus distance is extremely small–something like a tenth of a millimeter I have read–and apparently at that magnification cover glass thickness becomes critical. The scope ships with a tiny vial of cedar immersion oil (which has wonderful aroma). They don’t tell you that in the description and I wasted money ordering some separately. Oh, and the instructions provided were pathetic. A piece of paper folded over–4 pages–that tell you how to plug it in, turn it on and turn the focus wheel. You’re on your own to find info online about Abbe condensers and oil immersion lenses which are not intuitively obvious things to novices like me. To sum up, I like this microscope and I don’t think I’ll ever need anything better than this.