Just wanted to share this with you. I was in need for a microscope for PCB hand assembly, and had difficulty finding one that would meet my requirements: monitor plus USB connectivity, good working distance, ability to work directly on my bench surface, yet being
affordable. When I see Dave working with his beautiful Tagarno microscope, it brings tears to my eyes until I recall the price of that thing...
So I thought, I should give Chinese stuff another go and ordered two differnent models. The one that arrived second was an Andonstar ADSM201, but I didn't even unpack that because I was completely delighted by what I had received first.
I have bought this one on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07529YHYP You can find several sellers that have them, search for "14MP industrial camera microscope". I got mine for 271€.
Here are some pictures of the setup. The box came with an additional mounting arm that gives you even more freedom, which is not shown here.
The last picture shows the working distance at minimum zoom. As you can see, I can completely fit my fist underneath.
With the 30" monitor that I am using, the largest magnification is around 250x.
But for doing PCB rework or inspection, I was more interested in the working area at minmum zoom. This is the only "weakness" of this setup, as it is only 18 x 10mm. I would like to have a bit more, maybe 36 x 20mm. I have been looking for compatible reduction lenses (the one delivered is 0.5x), but wasn't successful with that.
The LED lamp is very good, bright and sufficiently evenly distributed, and it has a brightness control pot.
The camera itself does its job, but you have to live with the typical Chinesium way of doing things. There is no manual for it( I was lucky to find that somewhere else on the internet). It is highly over-speced. They claim that it would have 14MP, but the saved pictures have 10.5MP, and I am pretty confident that these are scaled. I would guess that the image sensor is 1920x1080. Here are two sections of the same image, the first one shows the raw image. The second was scaled down to 44.4%, and then scaled back up to 100%, using Lanczos filter each time. I cannot spot a difference between them...
What I really like about the camera is its connectivity. In the pictures above I use its HDMI output, but you can also connect it to a PC via USB and use it like a webcam, and it even has a microSD card slot.
This is a snapshot image coming directly from the camera at min zoom:
From me this one gets a 4 out of 5, which doesn't happen often for Chinesium stuff