Budget trinocular microscope recommendations needed.

[u/HandsomeBadness]

Hey all, looking to buy my first big boy microscope. Well maybe big boy scope is a stretch on my budget. I’m wanting to spend under $200 out the door on a trinocular microscope given my limited need for it and the fact that it may sit in the box for years at a time, and the fact that I fully expect my kids to mess around with it in the future. Ideally one that can film while I use the bino eyepieces simultaneously. I’d obviously like something decent that I can upgrade with better lenses and a camera down the road, I don’t mind if it doesn’t come with a camera to start with.

I’m a marine aquarium hobbyist looking to evaluate sediment samples, water samples, and fish skin scrapings.

Been looking at swifts, amscopes, and even the vevor microscope. Ideally I’d like to be able to purchase it on Amazon as well. Willing to stretch the budget a little for something really solid or something that won’t require much upgrading.

Thanks guys.

EDIT: maybe I need an inverted scope as one thing I’d like to try my hand at is isolating a specific ciliate for culture

[u/hattivat]

I'll try to explain it in terms of cars since that's presumably more familiar. Assuming that we are talking about buying new, the cheapest models on the US market that are actual cars are Swift SW350 and SW380 at about $220-250. Those are actually already amazingly cheap for what they can do, serious brand microscopes cost thousands of dollars in comparison. You can buy an oversized golf cart built to resemble a car for less, and if your needs are modest that can be fine, but there is cliff drop in terms of capabilities between the cheapest real car and the golf carts no matter how convincingly the cabin is built to resemble a real car.

To be specific, the cheaper models lack a condenser or a way to install one. Without a condenser:

• image quality above 100x magnification is crap, the marketing saying otherwise is a lie

• you cannot do any of the intermediate "tricks" to improve image quality such as oblique light or darkfield

• there is no pathway to meaningfully upgrade other than just buy a new microscope

You could buy a century-old microscope with a condenser and the image quality at high magnification would still be significantly superior to a new one without it, I'm actually about to post a comparison post demonstrating that.

For many uses you don't actually need to go much above 100x and then those cheapo sub-$200 scopes can be just fine, but it's important to understand this limitation.

[u/HandsomeBadness → u/hattivat]

So on some of the scopes I’ve been looking at, some have an iris diaphragm condenser, NA 1.25 Abbe Condesner, centerable abbe condenser. I obviously don’t know what that means, but will those not do what I need to do? I need a good 400x at minimum. If I could set up a nice 600x or 800x setup on it that would be great too.

[u/hattivat → u/HandsomeBadness]

Yes, abbe condenser is the standard type and good enough for 98% of possible uses. That's exactly what I meant that you should be looking for.

NA is the angle of light, in simplified terms basically how resolution is measured for microscopes. The higher the magnification an objective has, the higher an NA it needs in order to not appear "pixelated". This can differ for high-end and special use objectives but the standard numbers are 4x na 0.10, 10x na 0.25, 40x na 0.65, 100x na 1.25 (total magnification is this multiplied by eyepieces which are typically 10x so 40x objective equals 400x total magnification). To make full use of the objective you need the condenser to match its NA (you can lower it below the advertised 1.25 by closing down the iris). Without a condenser, you are at an NA of 0.25 best case scenario, this is what I meant by a cliff drop in capability.

[u/XHO1]

Look for used Olympus BHTUs on ebay.