[brewtide]

Our household recently acquired an optical scope. 10x, 40x, 400x with stock eyepiece. With a cellphone adapter, which is about a 40x for the objective (vs 10x actual eyepiece) we hit about 1600x magnification at our kitchen table.

Absolutely surreal to take a toothpick end of yogurt, put it on a slide and WATCH the bacteria in the yogurt running around.

Or other small beings munching up things as they swim along.

It's been a real eye opener for the 7 and 9 year old and strongly suggest people investigate things like this, it's downright cool.

But yes, the few 'lesser' digital scopes are far better for cool pictures of bugs, bees, ants, flies, etc. Once you get into the optical / need slides route, you really need to be looking for literal microscopic things or the depth of field (and lack of available light) make it quite a letdown.

We can see fruit fly individual blood cells flowing out of a smashed fruit fly into a slide. So. Damn. Neat.

[jrussino]

My kids are a bit younger than yours (3 and 5), but I'd love to do this with them at some point. Which scope did you buy? I see plenty of relatively "cheap" (<$100) options on Amazon; any reason to avoid those or would they be sufficient for this purpose?

[brewtide]

It's a Walter 40-cxm-100 model from ... 2005 ish maybe? (Point being , it's all metal, and SOLID) - where I imagine a newer model may be not so metal and solid (or maybe it is?)

Regardless, we lucked out and had someone give it to us because they were no longer using it for their original purpose (finding parasites , etc in many large flocks of sheep via fecal samples - get gave it a good wipe down, haha - plus I grew up on a farm and live in Maine, so wasn't much of a concern...) But originally seemed to be a $400 scope. Now a comparable model seems to be closer to $300.

Honestly, I have pretty limited microscope experience, but my experience with anything optical really tends to carry a paying for the glass quality situation, and where things like binoculars, telescope, cameras you get it, anything where the optics ARE the tool, there seems to be a price point somewhere separating "this does not work as intended vs this works as intended and this it is actually useful". I have no idea where this line is for microscopes however. Kids telescopes, junk.

I don't know your kids, but at 3 and 5 we certainly had a cheap digital scope to plug into a phone and explore - I still have ladybug, bees, etc pictures on the wall. If you don't have one of these yet, I'd suggest that route first? I can say that my son (9) finds the bacteria/etc amazing as I do, but my daughter is still more into the digital lower zoom levels. Partially age, partially kid to kid basis.

Been doing all of these type of stuff with them hardcore since 2 and 4. Dry ice experiments, building weird things, even built one of those digital topographical sandboxes you've probably seen in the living room (then went for blocks covered by painter rags, instead of sand in the living room...and I'm a painter, ha)

Point is, it's paid off huge. They are ever curious about the world, and often approach things as how or why does this work?

New toys for us all is a hackRF/portapack and a RTL-SDR, and it warms my heart to see them learning about RF at the same time I do.

Sorry, tangent. I'd try to figure out where that optical price point is. And if looking to cheaply get it on a screen, a cellphone adapter is a pita to hook up (it's on a nexus 6p old phone for our case) , it works pretty well, and the additional camera processing our phones do actually seems to add to the experience vs a stand alone camera unit ($150-$500).

We have moss soaking in water on the counter now. Tomorrow is family day, and we're aiming to get real up close and personal to some water bears!

[brewtide]

Oh and I was wrong. Its a 4x, 10x, 40x paired with a 10x objective.

Camera objective unknown but seems to be around a 40x

There is a HUGE jump from the 10 to the 40 when you switch.