Digital Microscopes

If you're an adult now and enjoying the revolution in technology that is the personal computer, you likely don't have fond memories of using microscopes in school. You knew they should be fun, but they were out of focus, made your eyes tired, and nothing seemed to happen. Well now that digital microscopes have come along, teaching life sciences, and experiencing them in our own homes, has undergone a dramatic shift.

Putting a USB cable on a compound microscope
We hate to deprive glory from whomever "invented" the digital microscope, but it is simply a glorified compound microscope with some computer software and a USB cable. This is no small feat, for sure, but we like to think that Jannsen, van Leeuwenhoek, and other optical pioneers did all the hard work.

The digital microscope is easy to use and widely available for staggeringly low prices, considering the amount of technology involved. Sure, you can spend $1,000 for a first rate model, and we wouldn't discourage it, but good magnification up to 150X can be achieved for as little as the price of a good steak dinner. If your digital microscope package includes a camera feature, the resulting images can be captured as photos or videos and sent to friends, or edited and submitted to Nobel committees for consideration. In addition to these fun applications, it allows users to review the observation of specific events for educational and scientific purposes.

Set up and use
Attaching anything to your computer is absurdly easy these days, and a digital microscope is no exception. This amounts to installing software included with the digital microscope, attaching a USB cable, preparing the slide and focusing your image, then opening the software. Generally focusing is done with the actual eyepiece rather than on screen. But the image you get will be a real-time representation of what's happening on the slide. So now enjoy all that meiosis, mitosis, flagellation, and microphagy without the strain and without having to share the eyepiece!