Hi, it's Digital Microscope time! I'm quite excited about this one. You know how I've had the Tigana microscope for many years now and I've been doing like all of my video microscope work under the Tigana microscope and it's fantastic. but the problem is it's very expensive. It's like I think maybe $4,000 worth of kit.

Now this is why I was quite excited over on my Eevblog 2 channel which I'll link in down below and at the end if you haven't seen it and you should be subscribed to Eevblog 2 because that's where I upload lots of extra content and stuff I Saw a new digital microscope from Suba Engineering which is an Australian company and it's performance was absolutely awesome. I was a bit bit blown away by it and it was like 1800 Australian dollars with a monitor and the impressive part about it is I don't know if you can see that but it has like a focus square in there and if you move things around I can just tilt this board like this and things will come in to magically come into focus like that. So regardless of the tilt of the board, you want to look at the edge of the board. Well there it is.

No problems whatsoever, want to go right down the bottom? There it is. The Super Engineering said that they had actually developed this themselves even though it was meaning China but then somebody in the Eevblog forums saw this and went nope. I've had one of those cameras for like a year or something like that. It has exactly the same menu system like this version 2.2 9 and I don't know the name of the built-in nice software, you know doesn't have any about system or anything like that I don't know if they developed it but Eakins or a akin some brand camera and they said here it is you can buy it on Aliexpress for 460 US dollars.

So I was went well I'm gonna NAB one of those that's cheaper than 1800 Australian bucks. Let's check it out. It seems to be absolutely identical to the Tsuba Engineering one. Now you have to be very careful which one you actually buy cuz I Ekans make or sell a lot of different models so I'll link it in down below 460 US dollars I think it's a bit five hundred but it's on sort of special I guess they have like permanent specials on Aliexpress and it's got HDMI out which goes directly to Monda It's got a USB which you plug the supplied mouse into just to control the on-screen our stuff and it's also got a micro SD card that you can record video on and 5volts USB I'm just pairing it from a battery pack on here.

It's got a Sony IMX 290 sensor in it and it's a full HD at 60 frames per second. and it's got a seamount adapter on there as well for any C-mount lens. And it's an auto focusing camera. You can actually see the sensor moving in and out there Yeah, it's an autofocus system which goes right back in there, so very nice.

You can just buy the camera on its own. This particular package. they do sell other lenses, but this is a nominal hundred and eighty x lens and we'll check this in a minute on a normal 24 inch output monitor. and it's like a generic branded so I'm not sure what could be their own brand or their sourcing it from somewhere.

who knows where they're getting it from. Not sure what diameter that is, but you can I add protectors or other things to the front and by looking at my super engineering video, it looks to be the same lens, but of course Suba have designed their own like enclosure around the thing. but I'm not going to say it's absolutely identical, but it's pretty darn close. This doesn't seem to be the exact same camera model that's used on the Tsuba Engineering one because if you have a look at the video, it's actually got the Micro SD card on the side.

so maybe they've got a slightly different model or haven't had it customized for them. Anyway, as far as I can tell, it's exactly the same firmware and works and the performance seems to be identical. now. the stand is about 55 60 US dollars extra and I'm not a huge fan of it.

the beveled edge here which stops it from pivoting that doesn't go in place properly and it's a bit how you're doing generally. But it's good enough because once you've actually set up your distance here, which for this particular lens is about 100 millimeters, you don't really need to touch this at all because it'll just automatically focus from flat right up to the maximum height of this thing. so you don't have to really adjust that any further at all. There it is.

we're right on the edge of that. PCB Now very nice. So whilst I don't really like it, it's You know it's good enough for the money. So how do you adjust this well? What you do is you set it to maximum zoom like this, and then you tweak matter the physical level of it until it's gonna focus in like that.

And for this particular lens, as I said, it's around about a hundred millimetres. Basically anything within that height range there is going to be automatically focused by the camera itself up here. and that's what the great thing about it. traditional digital ones.

You really have to dick around with the height of these things and you don't have to do that here. It's great. But that being said, I didn't realize until after I bought this that actually our there's three different lenses available for this and if we zoom out all the way there, you can see that's about 19 millimeters our maximum field of view there. And the monitor here is 533 across.

so 533 divided by 19. That gives us a zoom of 28. So that's the minimum zoom on a nominal 24 inch monitor here and maximum zoom just under 3 millimeters. So 533 divided by 3 Today 177 zoom.

And they class this lens that they supply as a Times 180 lens, so they must be referring to a reference in that to a 24 inch monitor. You know, if you're just doing general-purpose soldering, this is not. I'm not saying this is not the right camera for you. It likely is because it's excellent, but it's not the right lens for you.

You need the wider angle less zoom lens. so I highly recommend. If you're going to get it, get the set of three lenses. They're pretty cheap, like 50 bucks.

So as I said, the great thing about this is that we can go from having our board flat like that to tuning it right up at a ridiculous angle like that. Go from the zoom down there and then we can go right up to the top of the board straight onto that connector. They're like absolutely beautiful. Almost any tilt angle like that is.

everything can come within focus and this is great for visual inspection of Pcbs. Let me show you be going around here. everything's looking hunky-dory right? No worries, can't find any problems. Oh let's tilt our board shall we? Wha gotcha? Look at that and then we can go from the top of these pins right up here and we can just inspect anything.

We can have a look at those parts there and Bingo Gotcha Tombstone! So you can do that with other microscopes of course, but you've usually got to like dig around with the height and everything just to get the right focus range and all that with the autofocus in the camera here and a really like a good depth of focus arranged like this has probably got to be like eighty millimeters. It depends on the the zoom level, but so I really have to get the other lenses for this and I have to do a follow-up on that eevblog - all of them fit a larger our field of view for more general use. But and we can get the high even higher magnification again than this one. This one's already pretty extreme lens and then we have a greater working distance yet again.

but 100 millimeters here that's more than enough to get your eye and under. and even a large board like this to actually bend that under and actually get things are all in zooms now. Unfortunately, the HDMI output on this I can't capture it with my A VI o our 4k capture card I Don't know why I don't know what the deal is and the built-in video recording function of this. it kinda sort of works.

You know you go up here and you put your SD card in in your head video and it works. but it's a dot H.264 extension, but none of my video editors can import it. It's basically pretty shitty video recording functionality. So and maybe there's something I Don't know what the deal is with HDMI so it comes with the mouse, you plug it into the USB and we go up here and we've got them.

this drop down menu system and we're running in our version 2.2 9 I Don't know what happens with you know, firmware updates and that stuff like that. Find out the crosshair feature is basically absolutely useless. Can't like scroll them on here. You've got to go up here and you can move them.

There's no measurement capability, it's just it's just garbage. I Don't know why they even bothered. Been nice to have you know calibration measurement function early and stuff like that, but we don't anyway. So the thing we're interested in is this: AF ROI or auto focus region of interest and you can see our large rectangle around there.

We can actually make that smaller like this if you want a smaller focus area. And one of the problems with having it in the center like this is that when you get your soldering iron in there, it'll start to focus hunt. If you're soldering in the middle, that can be a problem. so you probably going to want to go up and set manual focus if you're just doing general soldering like that if you want, you can actually move the square around your region of interest over there and you can just moved around the screen horizontally and vertically so that's alright.

And we can only set our small or large, but that's more than good enough and you can muck around with the other settings, exposure, and stuff like that. You can get manual exposure, but I find the auto exposure works brilliantly I've and you know, manual white balance. You can tweak all the colors if you want and FBL I'm not sure what that is, but it just goes all the way with LBJ all the way out like that. and and we can capture to a JPEG or as I said rig clunky record video.

we can actually mirror it like that and we can flip it and HDR it does actually support higher dynamic range and I see a bit of a difference there, but I'm not not exactly sure. not a huge difference. Black and white and 50 60 Hertz are filtering here for a flicker filtering if you want that. So it's a pretty simplistic menu system but it works.

but I would have liked to have seen like especially like menu and autofocus you might use all the time. For example, wouldn't like to us seem like buttons on here that you know could do some of the basic functionality in the menu system that that would have been nice anyway. So what we're looking at here is tiny little like mobile phone board. that part in those parts there in the center there.

oh four, oh twos and these little tiny jobs here. these are Oh two oh one so we can zoom right in on those OTO one's not even zoomed all the way in. it gets a bit trickier you wouldn't. You know? you wouldn't ever use that as a working sort of like distance.

it's just way too close because you can't see your eye and come in. You know that's like plenty if you're working on even wider even. That's just a fine if you're working on Oh 201 so even smaller parts and that no issue whatsoever. And the and the frame rate because this is that sixty frames per second.

So the lag on this is just great and we can just get in there and just remove our little Oh - oh one part right there. but you saw the focus hunting there. I should have put on manual focus for that and I can tell you it's absolutely as good if not better than the Tigana at the 60 frames per second and the image clarity and everything else. the Sony sensor and it works fantastic.

although I do have my additional light here on the side so I can switch that off and just have my studio lights. Maybe you can see a bit of like our video noise on there, but not much. It's a pretty decent sensor now. I Would prefer to have a larger depth of field, shallow depth of field.

you only have to go one or two pins out and they start being out of focus so of course. but it's got a standard C-mount lens so you can install your own lenses and have a play around with it. From that aspect, you're basically buying into the camera technology, not so much the lens. So although it's not designed for it, let's have a look at a wafer under this things.

Let's see right into the center. There you go: AT&T SRAM Vintage anyone? coupons and test structures outside the die. But yeah, it's not a dying spec ssin microscope, but it it certainly does pass muster for that. And of course you can get an even higher magnification zoom than this one.

As I said, the stock lens that's a standard so8 ago, that's the biggest field of view. So yeah, really, just for general purpose soldering, you wouldn't be using this lens. You would get the wider angle one definitely. So let's just do a comparison with the Tigana Oh, he is like I've got the board near vertical like that and there you go.

We can see some layers in the board there and then immediately drop back down to those individual parts. There's absolutely no contest in terms of the field of view. I Mean look at that massive field of view. We got there and we got the digital zoom copy beat, but we're not using it's not really an Apples-to-apples comparison here because we've got a much higher zoom lens here as we'll see that is the maximum zoom we can do on the Tigana I got the same light for both room haven't got the internal light on the Tigana I'd say the Tigana is actually know a little bit noisier can turn the internal light on and the noise goes away a bit.

you can see like we obviously can't get the same zoom range but of course the Tigana. It's no contest in terms of like for me as a video blogger, I'm not going to give up my - Garneau it's just way too good in terms of what I need for video production and stuff like that with the smooth zoom where you can't get that with this like you've just got to manually dick around with it and stuff like that, it's not as nice, doesn't have as wide a range as the Takano so not even close in that respect can't get on the end of the board. and of course we don't have that focus box that is so good. There we go.

we can maybe do that if you want to like inspect components up close. There's really no contest. The Eakins is is an absolute winner. it just - it kills the Tigana But for just you know.

general like a wider angle soldering, you know the Takara is still impossible to beat the thing else, but they're both full. HD 60 frames per second. Latency is the same between them, and one of the problems I've had with the Takano is doing exactly this like inspection. That's the most.

I can zoom in 40 times optical zoom and I'm tilting the board that's at 45 degrees and I cannot get that chip there to focus. So the focus range and depth of field of the Tigana is not nearly as good as what it is on the ikan. So yeah, they're really almost two different beasts in that respect there. at this point.

What was it? 19? That is where the zoom level of the ikan starts. So whereas this is almost where the Tigana ends. So really with this particular out of the box times 180 lens there, they are completely different. our beasts.

And if you curious to know, drawers about 3.9 watts or thereabout so you can like I've been using this for you know, couple hours now and I'm barely down to it. you know I'm not even down to the first bar on my battery pack. So yeah, it's quite usable from just a USB battery bank suite. So is this thing a to go? No Killer.

Well yes and no in terms of the actual work camera itself, the video performance the Full HD at 60 frames per second and the low noise, low light, our performance is as good if not better than the Tigana which is still less than like one-fifth the price of the Tigana even on special I think. but the Takano is much better in that it has the electronic, the separate zoom control you can have on your bench and you can just go zoom up, zoom down I've got mine like on the leg of my bench and I use that so for my specific niche uses that Igano is still better. except I'll be definitely using this to capture any like inspection stuff because the Takano just can't do it nearly as well as this one does. There's just no contest.

the Tigana will view this entire board under there. I've got no chance in hell of viewing this entire board under here. and the Tigana is like 250 to 300 millimeters work in distance. so in that aspect, like there's no contest.

But for the prize, this is absolutely incredible. I Don't know of anything that can beat it. I'm just thoroughly thoroughly impressed by this. It's a it's a winner winner chicken dinner.

it really is. So if you're in the market for a inspection microscope, but as I said by all three lenses with it, definitely. but it's an absolute winner and I definitely give it a thumbs up. So if you want to check it out, I'll provide the link to Aliexpress down below.

Just be careful, they sell lots of different models. You have to get this specific one with the autofocus feature in it so ya don't get confused. A lot of them look are very similar. so I don't even know the model number of this thing.

I Got no idea. Well software's a little bit clunky and the thing I'm disappointed with the video recording. all that sort of stuff. Still have to work out the HDMI capture issue.

I'll have to try another card or something. Definitely inspection type stuff. It's that and really fine, you know. Oh 201 Oh 402 surface mount solder and stuff like that.

It's brilliant. So anyway, if you liked the video, give it a big thumbs up. As always, thank you to my Patreon supporters who helped me fund me to buy stuff like this so I can show them off to you. And as always you can discuss down below or over on the EEV blog forum.

Catch you next time.