Digital Blue QX5 Digial Microscope | 
| Brand: Prime Entertainment
Category: CE
Buy New: $99.99
as of 7/29/2010 21:21 CDT details
New (3) Used (1) from $69.99
Seller: ShopTronics
Rating:  31 reviews
Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP
Media: Software
Age: 6 - 15 years
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.3
Dimensions (in): 3.2 x 1.3 x 6.7
Warranty: 1 year warranty
MPN: QX5
Model: DB12011
UPC: 735858141093
EAN: 0735858141093
Promotion: Save $9.99 when you spend $499.99 or more on Qualifying Items offered by ShopTronics. Enter code B7BZWTGY at checkout. Terms and Conditions
Promotion: Data not available Terms and Conditions
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Features:
| • | Includes specimen jars, sample slide tweezers, eye dropper, slide clip, software CD-ROM, USB cable, microscope stand and microscope | | • | Video playback 15 frames per second | | • | Magnification 10X, 60X, 200X | | • | Resolution VGA 640 x 480, twin super bright LED light source | | • | Portable and easy to use in both stationary and "handheld" modes |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The QX-5 Microscope is the perfect educational tool for children who want to learn about their world! Attach this electronic microscope to your PC and let children explore the tiny, hidden parts of their world.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
 excellent piece of kit December 17, 2004
I. Harding
146 out of 149 found this review helpful
The Qx5 microscope is the natural follow-on from the Qx3. Used as a toy with the "child friendly" supplied software, it will load onto the latest machines; difficulties with the old Qx3 software on Windows XP Pro were not encountered with the Qx5. I have found this software to be intensely irritating for my use, but letting my two young nephews loose on my computer I was delighted to find that the whizzes, zips and boings the program generates during its natural operation freed me to be elsewhere in the house without fear that my young guests had given up on the microscope and were trying to sabotage my machine in ways available only to the very young. Not that I need have feared: a simple walk around the local park produced more than enough samples to keep them delighted until dinner. An excellent Christmas game can also be knocked out with the Qx5 and a laptop by wandering around the house, taking magnified snaps of the decorations and furniture, then challenging guests to identify the objects. (Print thumbnails and you can have a dozen people wandering around different parts of the house peering at ornaments.)
However, I have not bought two new Qx5s to supplement the Qx3s I already have just to play games. These `toys' are truly excellent scientific instruments. They allow for rapid inspection of small components, provide good images for presentations, and an image of a graticule can be used to calibrate distance per pixel, providing simple distance and area measurement. These images can be fed to image-processing packages for colour-dependent area measurements and other techniques. Contact angles of droplets on surfaces can also be measured from these images, with the 60x magnification matching the best droplet size. The improved pixel count of the Qx5 gives markedly better resolution of crystal morphology and the more intense LED illumination at last makes 200x magnification generally workable. The rectangular grid of pixels on the old Qx3 has been corrected to a square grid meaning circles are now the same number of pixels across as they are high (rather than 10% fatter). They can be used to monitor and record movement because they collect movies as well as stills: with 15 frames per second (up from the Qx3's five) much faster events can be captured.
So what are the downsides? This is a souped-up Qx3, with a better webcam at one end and brighter light at the other, so in common with the Qx3 the optics are not perfectly matched. The focal plane for each magnification is therefore in a different position requiring re-focusing after every change, as well as producing occasional microscopes with one of their focal planes squeezed quite close to the microscope body. This can mean the plastic stand is at the limit of its movement and bouncing on the last tooth of the cog, or if you've built your own holder you may start bumping into the plastic shield around the light. The TWAIN driver is new, and has no light control, and there is no utility offered to control light separately from your Start Menu. It captures images on command, but then you have to select the image to pass it on to your graphics package - an unnecessary extra step for most applications. The automatic colour balance bleaches images of predominantly one colour, and with the bluish LED illumination, yellow seems to come off particularly badly. This is not true with the interface that opens for capturing movies, where all sorts of settings can come under the operator's control, but the driver (at least in XP Pro) is a Windows Driver Model (WDM) rather than Video For Windows (VFW), limiting your options to only more recent software, and the light is still not accessible.
Generally, however, I'm delighted with the improvements in image resolution and frames per second that the new camera and light offer, and for a price that seems lower than the Qx3 commanded until the very end of its commercial life, these `toys' are extremely good value for anyone who wants to peer at small things through the eye of the twenty-first century.
Fantastic!! April 11, 2005
Rebecca Tippett
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
My son got this for his birthday and absolutely loved it. Immediately he was making movies and magnifying everything. He loves that it comes off the base to magnify just about anything that he can get close to the computer. He asked me if he could take it to school and share it with his class. His teacher loved that they could all gather around the computer and look at the images. It is even better in the classroom becasue she can verify that they are looking at the right things, and when students ask questions they can point to it on the computer screen instead of trying to explain what they are seeing through the regular lens. This is a great item for beginning to use a microscope and helping a child learn the ropes.
Bought it to enrich the kids but I love it too September 20, 2005
J. A. Edwards (Los Angeles, CA USA)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
I just received this item last night and after just one evening of use I can already tell both the kids and I will have a blast with it. The optics, lighting, and overall performance of the microscope are SURPRISINGLY good. The supporting software is also very straighforward, functional, and kid-friendly. As others have pointed out there is a strange lack of instructions that leaves you feeling initially clueless (there is a "Help" feature accessible through the software) but the overall usage is intuitive enough that it wasn't really missed. Also, some of the webpages that I've seen indicate that you need 4 AA batteries but this is not true. (Maybe the earlier model needed it?) I very much recommend this product for your budding scientist (and yourself!)
My daughter loves it! May 1, 2005
S. Crane (Corvallis, OR)
16 out of 18 found this review helpful
My daughter rec'd this for christmas, and LOVES it! She is 9 years old and likes to go on 'nature walks' to gather specimens to look at and take pictures of... She has a great interest in nature, expecially rocks and plants - so this is the perfect toy for her.
I wish it had come with an instruction manual, but it's simple enough to use that we were able to figure it out and get it working in less than 30 minutes. the software is easy for her to use and she can hook up and get started all on her own. She uses it less often now, as is to be expected - but it has more to do with not being able to use our (only) computer than lack of interest. overall it's one of the most entertaining toys she has and will be used for a long time.
Great fun indeed! June 29, 2005
Thomas N. Brogan (United States)
19 out of 23 found this review helpful
My wife bought me this microscope for Father's Day. I use it to inspect and take pictures of the edges of knives I sharpen. It's brilliant and the software loaded up onto Win2000 without a hitch. When our daughter is older, she'll be using it to explore the teeny parts of the universe (and hopefully inspecting edges she sharpens, too!).
Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
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