Prior to this microscope, we owned a swift SW150 student microscope valued at about $130, so we had some experience with better than junk toy microscope use. Swift appears to be a company what is focused on microscopes whereas this particular microscope appears to be from a company that is rebadging an existing product.

That said, this is a full package, perfect as a basic student with microscopes. I do think that a lot of the cost of this set is in the extras. You get a the form cut case, a power cord, two sets of viewfinder lenses, a set of what look like some kind of Barlow lenses, a 2 megapixel USB camera, a cell phone mount, a set of 10 premade specimen slides, and an instruction booklet. You also get a bag with blank slides, tweezers, swabs, a small test tube and small specimen dish, a cleaning cloth, gauze and a small knife.

The microscope itself is fairly basic though it does boast four objective lenses, a fully articulated specimen stage, under and over specimen lights, course and fine focus knobs, a binocular viewfinder and a monocular viewfinder. There is a lot of plastic on this thing. The body of the microscope is metal, but the specimen tray, microscope head, and binocular viewfinder are all made of cheap ABS plastic. So too with the lenses which may be glass but have housings made of plastic. Oddly, the barlow lenses are metal.

In use, the microscope works well enough. The adjustable specimen stage definitely puts this microscope above other budget options because you only have to move the stage instead of the slide to see what you’re looking at. One thing to note is that the stage doesn’t move down very far, this makes it kind of useless for looking at larger items such as phonograph styluses. My Swift microscope does not have this issue.

The image quality of this microscope is acceptable and the twin lights allow for using the microscope with slide of for flat objects. We used it to look at pen on textured paper. Image quality-wise, It’s a very serviceable microscope for beginner use.

One thing to note is that the USB camera has a CD installation disk. This is kind of a problem since CD-R om drives stopped being a thing on computers about a decade ago. Apparently there are drivers you can find online, but in the box there is no link or QR code to take you to where to find them. It’s also windows only. This is definitely something to be aware of if this is a feature you’re looking for.

Bottom line: Very usable microscope with some nice quality of life things. I don’t like all the plastic, especially at just under $300 (at time of review). You can get all metal microscopes for a little bit more. They won’t have all the extras, but I’m not sure all the extras are all that much value added anyway. Still, I really like that it has its own pack away case and the 2 MP camera is a useful thing to have if using with kids.