Hi, it's Mini review time today. We're going to take a look at a couple of these one hung low brand USB microscopes. Are they any good for electronics work? Uh, for PCB inspection, soldering, Joint Inspection, and other things? No, they're probably not going to be all that useful for uh SMD soldering and things like that because the lag through the USB that's a pretty well-known problem with this thing. although we'll probably give those a try.

You never know because if you want to do um SMD uh, soldering if you want a good tool for that. You Know topof Thee Line Mantis um microscope or one of, or just one of the uh, cheaper a couple of hundred stereo microscopes say the Um Am Scope brand ones you can get on eBay But um, these little things. um $30 odd doar uh for this thing and about $60 odd dollars for this thing. Are they any good for electronics work? Well, they're worth giving them a go at this price.

Let's see what they got to offer. but I don't know. You get what you pay for. First up, this thing and it doesn't even have a brand and it's sold under many different names, many different labels, and uh, some different uh, magnification settings.

Um as well. This one is claimed to be uh, 40 * 2 800 times. So that knob there set your Zoom you can see the oh yeah, you can see it pop out all the way in there. There we go anyway.

it's a bit hard to see and it's got a LED ring light in there of course. um, brightness adjustment for the LED ring light. So that's a, you know, pretty handy because sometimes you can actually have uh, too much light and get uh Reflections and things like that. And there's a zoom button on it and a snapshot button for taking a photo.

Although I can probably tell you right off the bat that button on the side by the time you actually hit it. If you're getting any sort of decent uh, zoom level on this thing, the just the movement of pushing that microscope, pushing that button is just not going to work. And this stand. really? I Mean it is just absolute garbage.

I Mean the the quality of this thing just makes your skin crawl. It really is. you know, 30 bucks delivered. You don't expect much at all.

It's got this one. This is actually quite not a bad mechanism. Um, you know for sort of moving this thing around. It can go with all sorts of, uh, odd angles.

so that's you know. Really quite easy to use and simple. But ultimately I mean this thing. Look it just Falls over.

It's just it's it's just garbage, right? So for 30 bucks, eh? I don't know. you'd have to be pretty desperate. And of course, anything you put near it must be right near the base there, so you know it's just doesn't have the big extendable arm like the other one does. But yeah, anyway.

um, it's just you know. USB Plugs straight in operates as a camera and comes with some crusty software. So eh, 30 bucks and then we have this one here. and it, uh, kind of sort of does have a brand name.

it's called um, Andonstar. although if you go to the Anden Star.com website, there's nothing there. It's hopeless. But look at the nice, uh, metal, uh, chrome finish stand that comes in I Really do like this It you know it.

It comes in pieces and that just, uh, sits on there and then that just uh, slides out of there like that. So nice little thumb screws. you can just put that in and adjust that and then you can. you know freely, sort of move this up and down.

but there's also a focus control on the top there which actually pulls the cable in and out. Surprisingly, so there you go. there's my finger and it can pull that all the way in, but there's actually quite a few turns on that. like three or four uh turns.

So this actually, and and even better, this goes up and down like this, so you don't necessarily have to do that. Although for to get in major Zoom changes, you have to set that first so you might set that all the way down the bottom. For example, like that right close to your product that you're uh, inspecting and then use that as a fine adjustment. and this is really quite nice.

Not sure how many turns that is, but you know that is is just really excellent. So there's a fair bit of uh, working distance in this thing if it can actually focus at the lower Zoom levels for this I Believe the zoom on this one is like uh uh I think 10 times to like 200 times or something like that so not as much as the other one. The other one's designed for really high magnification, but as I said, the other one does come in different Zoom levels, but this one is really quite nice. so even if the camera in this is garbage, even if this one turns out to be better, I'd get this and just like, strap it on the side somehow and use this nice stand as an adjustment tool cuz this is I I Rather like this, especially for the price.

um$ 60 Australian dollars delivered I Think it's the same in uh Us as well and this one comes with the snapshot button sensibly on the cable here so you're not, you know moving this thing if you got a maximum of 200 times Zoom there's no way you can have the button on there. you just you know, touch it and it. you know it Wiggles a little bit and you know you're gone. So having it on here plus the Uh LED adjust on there as well.

Much much nicer quality product. Let me tell you, and there's the head on this thing and once again, it's got 8 SMD leads there to uh, act as a ring light for this thing and when you adjust the focus at the top, it doesn't move. This thing doesn't move in and out so it's a fixed level as I showed before. you have to physically move the thing up and down on the stand and that's a much better way to operate than the other one.

And the cheapy one actually came with this little handy microscope uh, calibration ruler chart. It's got a little Grid in there and everything it's you know it really is quite handy. and as a comparison with my Uh Canon Hfg10 with my Opteka X 10 macro lens, this is the best zoom I can get with my that is uh 10 mm across there so you know the um field of view of my camera here is like 13 mm across. All right, let's start with this uh, cheapy one and it's um, got some software called Cool in Tech So I I'm not sure if that's the brand name of the Uh microscope and then it's sold under other names I Have no idea.

Anyway, the software that comes with it is, uh, pretty comprehensive and you'll probably see this in the eBay ads and stuff. They'll actually promote this thing as being like a a microscope tool, so it's got all these measurement functions you can measure, do angle measurements, you can do distance measurements, and no wonder it comes with a calibration uh chart cuz you can run a calibration uh, routine on the thing and then uh, you know, get accurate distance measurement. So if you're after a a microscope to do sort of, you know, documentation stuff, this one actually might do the business. but is it a practical unit like this? I mean well.

I've got a small PCB here. Okay, and I've the live image it all installed Fine By the way you know and it just, um, the drivers aren't really required and it all just works. It's no problem whatsoever. So what we can do with the video is we can actually set the video size here and that, uh uh affects the frame rate.

Now they claim like this like 30 um frames per second or something. but that's only at the really low resolutions on this thing. So if you go to the higher resolutions of course, you get much poorer. Up updating now.

I'm 640 by 480 there. let's drop down to 320 by 240, you know, pretty pretty small, but the update rate, you know that's that's pretty quick. I don't uh, mind that at all. I'm not sure how that's going to work I'm capturing at 25 frames per second on my uh, screen capture program at the moment.

but anyway, that's a five pin so 23. so let me change that frame rate back. Let's say you want to set it to 12 uh, full? 1,600 by 1200? Well I'd need a much bigger screen than this obviously. but you can see that's a bit laggier so not nearly as good.

To be fair, this model is the higher Zoom model so it goes from 40 times to 800 times. So it really is a microscope. It's it's not. um, you know, really designed for you know General inspection and stuff like that cuz you really need a smaller Zoom like from 10 times upwards or something like that.

like as we'll see on the other one Zoom there the minimum Zoom is like that and then I need to bring it up. So we do have you know, a modicum of working distance in there. What is that? That's like 30 mm working distance or something. But as I said, the stand is absolutely useless I mean you know if you wanted to use this thing for any sort of uh uh, you know low Zoom work well, you can't use this stand.

You have to uh you know, either make something yourself or or get some other Arrangement it's hopeless. the that is a 5 Pin so 23 of course and they're 0402 parts so they're pretty tiny and we can adjust the light on here and as you can see but it does get pretty noisy like that but uh you know and it does auto adjust and and do it. You know it tries to adjust the contrast and and and exposure and that sort of stuff. Now as I said, there is a image capture button on the side.

absolutely useless I can try and take a screenshot of that but it ends up blurred like that because well, you're just moving the thing. It's hopeless. So you can actually do a screen uh capture from here. you can use the there we go capture picture button and then bang it'll save that to a file for you or you can just return to live video.

This is really not a great tool at all. I Don't like that. look at the overex exposure, it's blowing out. Granted this is a gloss black uh, solder mask on this thing so not the best.

But yeah, that's like you know it's pretty horrible I'm not really getting good results out of this thing at all. so you really do get what you pay for there with your 30 bucks. It's hopeless now. I Have shown a previous video where this effectively does have two different uh Zoo uh focal points on it.

so with the same working distance now let's go in and I'm not sure if I can demonstrate this time, but let's have a look at an RGB lead. You can see the die there on that RGB that 5 mm RGB lead. You can see the Bond wires going over to that, You can see the legs inside the housing. There's the legs popping out so that's not too bad.

but it's all about the ligh in and you could probably get better results if you had better lighting the building. LED Ligh is, you know, pretty ordinary. but uh. I have shown in a previous video how we can actually get a much better zoom on that if we go up and here we go.

we can actually, uh, look at this calibration chart under here like this and that's but. setting the zoom level on this thing is just. ah, absolutely horrible business like, but it'll probably hit another focal point in there somewhere. and oh I don't know about trying to get to 800 times Zoom it's just it's just a toy.

I Think you can make it? You can probably make it work you. Oh, you got it there. We go there, We go there, we go. There is a level.

there is a height there that, but the depth of field is, you know, So. and the focus height is so small. This this stand is just pile of garbage. really is heap of.

Don't get one of these unless you're absolutely desperate. All right, let's try this. uh, Anden star one and we've got the software set up and this is much much nicer. Look at this I mean that's just.

ah, it's beautiful. Look at the reach on this and I think we will be able to do some soldering under here because this is a much lower uh Zoom one and but if we really want to get high Zoom we can get right down in there and we'll see that in a minute. and uh, the software like you don't even install it, it just like you just copy it over and it's called New Anden Star here and um there's a capture uh, video capture program that comes with it. but we can just run the new Andon Star software and bingo we're in.

We're in like Flynn although I haven't uh set the ah there we go see look at that now. Unfortunately the um we because this is a gloss black solder mask. we're getting a lot of glare there, but there we go. we can get rid of that.

So if you got better ambient light like if you got lights uh that you know evenly light up the side like some little uh, soft uh box lights or something like that, it's going to be much better. The glare you're seeing on there is actually from my uh, overhead lead lights here. so yeah, please excuse this. This is the problem with gloss black solder masks.

but you can see that uh this really is quite nice. Look at the working distance there. Absolutely excellent and at full. Oh, it works as a webcam.

Hello, it's me. If I turn up the right way, There you go it. It actually works as a pretty decent webcam. So I'm quite.

uh. I'm quite pleased with that. that is. Uh, it's pretty useful.

Little uh, useful little. Gadget And there we go. Can zoom in and look at the working distance? I mean what's that? You know? 40 mm or something like that? Probably Maybe you know 50, 55 or something. like, you know, it's pretty good.

You could easily get a soldering iron in there at that sort of magnification level. So I got no problems with that at all. That works really nice. And of course, the closer you put it, you know you can adjust.

And the good thing is is that you really, you can adjust. This really really is quite smooth and you know, and it doesn't really move. Wobble The whole thing around like this piece of garbage that we had before. It's just crap and uh, but this one does work pretty well.

So I'm I'm pretty darn happy with that. and bingo, we've got it. And you can save things. There's a whole bunch of settings and things like that.

Um, and we can adjust the brightness contrast hu, saturation, sharpness, gamma, all sorts of stuff. and we can do video recording I'm not sure of the format uh of that, but yeah, I won't. Uh, it's not a huge in-depth review. I'm just having a muck around here.

once again. let's go in and see if we can get a uh Zoom inside. say that 5 mm lead there and see what we get. All right now.

I've got it a bit closer, but there's still a good 15 20 mm working distance there and you'll notice that the program is much more simplistic than the um other brand one. There's no measurement tools, there's nothing in it. I mean this is the entire uh setup menu here so you know you can, but you can do audio and uh, video recording. You can set your capture size I've got a 640 by 480 at the moment.

it does go up to 1,600 by 1200 same as the other one and then it's got different Uh video render, um algorithms I'm not sure uh what you know, quality. You're going to get out of there 25 frames per second. and as I said, you can adjust all of the various stuff down here. so if you want to do measurements and stuff well, you would have to manually calibrate it and you know, uh, do that in that post.

So this isn't the best tool for that. But as far as like just inspection goes, I mean check this out. This is really quite nice and it looks like we got something on the. looks like we got something on the lens there unfortunately.

um I don't know what that is. Maybe I should try and clean the lens on that. hang on. that's an Aning now.

unfortunately. Uh, that seems to be like inside the lens somewhere I can't seem to do anything about that, so look I won't worry about it at this stage. Okay, so just that's just a fury of this one. I've got, but look 640x 480.

This is quite good. This is quite nice to be able to pan around like that. and uh, there we go. We can zoom in and let's have a look at this lead and the thing is like it's really easy to sort of.

You know, adjust this. It's really great. So let's zoom in. let's see if we can zoom in on that.

I mean what you need to do is just put this right down the bottom like that so it's close and then bring that up like that. That's the way to do it and look at that. Excellent. No problems whatsoever and you can see that we can focus between easily Focus between the actual surface of the uh, epoxy uh lens on that lead and the dye inside there and really, that is quite quite stable.

I Could probably lock these up a bit tighter and you know, put some weight down cuz I think you know the bed's a bit uneven there so you could fix that up. That's pretty impressive. So if I change this to haven't tried the higher resolutions, let's go to 1280 by 960 here. And yeah, we're zoomed in much larger and I can hit this button here.

And of course that sort of takes the full screen. I could expand it the entire window, but now you can start seeing the lag. Look at that. The other one was actually better actually.

I Think this one's pretty? Look at the jello on that. Oh yeah, that's pretty awful. So you really, you know it's fine for inspection when you get in. you know, when you really want to, uh, capture something.

but for like, you know, live work under there and you know 600600 by 1200 is just going to be even worse. So that frame rate? yeah, that's just hopeless. What is that you know? Uh, 1 per second, 2 per second? Something like that? It's pretty awful. but on 640x480? well, let's let's go to 800 by 600 which is quite a usable resolution.

Yeah, no, that one's a bit. That one's a bit bad as well. So it looks like 640 By4 Radi is what you want to use for video and of course we can expand that out like that and we can zoom in like that. We can see our solder and we can see our silk screen designators there.

Our 0402 resistors in there. So this one's actually working. A treat. I Like it.

Let's put the calibration chart under here and uh, see if we can get anything on that and we're coming in there. We go there, we go. Let's turn that light up. Have I had that turned off all? I think I've had that turned off the whole time.

There you go, you can see the glare of the Ring light on there because of the uh, the film that we've got. Yeah, there we go. You can see the lights. There you go.

you can see the reflection off the film there, but that's that's to be expected. Now let's try something a bit. uh, better. I've got this old video card here and look at that.

I mean you once again, you get the glare of those leads. So at um, you know at the low Zoom levels, those leads become a real problem at the high microscope Zoom levels. it's fine. So you just want to get rid of that and rely on your external lights.

Really? I've probably got enough. I've probably got like 600 Lux or something on this uh, desktop right about now in terms of light, so we can now, uh, zoom in on that and I really like that so we can go in and inspect our PCB you know for hairline shorts or anything like that and that really is quite usable. You can see the solder mask There you go. Let's get right in there.

Light could be an issue now. Yeah, but we can get right in there. but light has become our enemy. Unfortunately, this is where we might need to turn it up.

There we go look at that. Beautiful. So this works really quite well for PCB inspection I'm pretty impressed with this and the usability of it in terms of you know, being able to operate the thing without dick it around and and the depth I mean I can get you know most of the board in there like that. and yes, I am about about attempt to solder on my chair here cuz I don't want to Lo move my laptop over to here so that I can actually uh see what I'm doing now I'm actually going to uh, be looking at the U laptop screen over here I've got no parts of course got no parts at all.

but let's just Reflow that and see this is. you know this is pretty real time. the 640 by 480 you know this is I'm just mucking around here I'm not doing any real serious uh sold room but you can see that that does actually work and uh, it works in real time. So if you had this on a big screen not as good as an optical microscope to be sure I find this surprisingly usable I mean 640x 480 if we go to the higher resolutions I think we're going to be screwed.

but uh, I can, certainly, uh, set that res, let's go up to 800 by 600. let's try and get a bit more resolution out of this sucker. and uh, see how well we get on there? No yeah, that update rate is still pretty good. Quite happy.

Quite happy with that. Yeah, I could still I can still use that? Not a problem at all. Let's go up again. Let's go up in resolution to 1280 by 960.

Woohoo! All right, and how's our frame rate? Let's have a look n n Now we start to get the lag. Now we start to get that jell effect. And at that zoom level, that's got a pretty decent working height of you know, 25 mm or so and more than enough because of the Slimline nature of this thing. you really can get your soldering iron in there even with the you know that's not a huge working distance.

but because it's so slim. Wow, this works pretty good and that's a decent enough zoom level too. So I Really quite like this. This is a I think it's a winner.

For 60 bucks, it's certainly well worth having. I Mean, as I said, not as good as a proper uh, you know, stereo microscope for soaring work and for uh, inspection work as well. But uh, you know, for 60 bucks? I Reckon you probably should have one of these suckers lying around. It's very versatile and the mechanism works pretty well.

at the high zoom level. It works okay for really, uh, close inspection. Let's see if we can get a PCB VR in there. All right.

So let's try 800x 600 mode with my microcurrent uh PCB here and we can have a look at some of the Vas. These are tinted vs because the solder mask is over the verer and that's probably like the maximum, almost the maximum zoom level. Not quite. Um, because I'm sort of.

yeah, we got to turn the brightness up there a bit. can probably there we go look at that. that's not bad at all. and if we go over to our pad, that's obviously going to be too bright so we can just turn the uh brightness down on that.

And because this thing rotates like this, we could probably get some side inspection there on the barrel down in here. It's the first time I've done this, so please excuse if I don't quite get it right the first go. No. I Got to tighten the thing up but we can see down into the barrel.

look at that. Wow, that's really quite nice and this is what you want these things for. This is what they're really use for. You can see the depth of the field.

this is a standard 1.6 mm PCB and uh, you know we can't get the top and the bottom of that in Focus but you can see the wall of that pad down in there by turning that an angle and we can get you know sharper angles by just you know rotating this thing around like that. So this is really good and I Love the small pencil form factor. like that it really allows you to uh, get in there and work really easy. And Just for kicks.

This is an old uh windowed P 16 C74 A when you had to actually erase these things under UV light. They didn't have flash memory, so there it is. There's the D and you can see all the bond wires inside a pick processor one of of the early ones. Awesome.

So there you go. That was a bit longer and more rambly than I expected. but that's the Ando star. Uh, USB microscope and it's pretty darn handy and usable.

That pencil form factor: Don't bother getting one of these. Really, these are just a crap. I Mean you know. Granted, this is yeah, it's got much higher zoom and I as I've showed in previous videos you can make get this to work.

but oh no, it's just horrible. This thing is actually quite usable. Well worth the 60 bucks. Catch you next time.