Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
 Celestron microscope February 20, 2009
James T. Brom (Flatwoods, KY)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Just received....no dark area, LCD is clear and bright. A fun, serious toy. Want to create some unique abstract digital photos. Have not tried the SD card port, but seems and easier way to transfer to computer.
Great Microscope... November 2, 2009
Fish Breeder (MD)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I'm a reef keeper / clownfish breeder. This microscope was mentioned at MACNA this year and looked like what I was looking for.
As a bonus it takes nice pictures and videos. No more looking thru a tiny view finder. Your specimen is right there on the screen in front of your eyes. Anyone gathered around can see the clear image. You can also share it using the picture and vid capture.
Nice product, nice quality, nice price!
A great upgrade for science enthusiests. January 19, 2009
Nunyabeezwax (Texas)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
Pretty awesome options. Has a surprising amount of existing internal memory and the battery life is extensive. I love it and use it daily. Amazon was a hundred dollars less than ordering directly from the Celestron site.
I purchased this item over a year ago and I still use it regularly with no problems yet, and I haven't had to change the batteries yet!
Excellent Microscope for the Digital Age December 21, 2009
Colin L. Miller (SIERRA VISTA, AZ USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I had an ordinary optical "200x" microscope and saw a few shaky, interesting things in a drop of water on a glass slide, I but had no good way to take a photo. Holding a digital camera up to the eyepiece was problematic at best. I'd heard of USB microscopes that connected to a PC, such as the QX3. Checking the reviews on Amazon quickly dissuaded me from that. Then I found the Celestron 44340. It had a built-in 2MP digital camera. Images were saved to internal memory and transferred to the PC via USB cable, or to a SD card. I was also concerned about getting good images. In books like Guide to Microlife (ISBN 0-531-11266-7), there were excellent photos in darkfield illumination, as well as the usual brightfield. The Celestron 44340 did both, although darkfield only worked at the 4x and 10x objectives. I got a set of glass slides, glass cover slips, some depression slides, eyedroppers, and containers. After the summer rains, there were many places to collect samples, as well as from shorelines of rivers and lakes. I was able to successfully image in brightfield and darkfield rotifers, amoebas, flatworms, copepods, ostracods, shrimp hatchlings, vorticella, bursaria, diatoms and algae, and a variety of fast-moving ciliates. In addition to digital photos of up to 2 megapixels in size, I also recorded movies of a few seconds to a few minutes, sometimes switching between 4x magnification to 10x or 40x to get more details, and even switching between brightfield and darkfield. If I found something interesting, I could use software to extract a still image. The only CON I can think of is that when the microscope is turned off then back on, the internal date and time resets to 1/9/2031 8:00 PM, so any photos or movies taken all have that date, unless you manually set it every time.
Fine little microscope February 20, 2010
Ingrid Shafer
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
For the price (less than $200.00 at Amazon) this is an fine little microscope, solidly built, portable (with a light-weight, well-designed case), easy to set up, and simple to use. The manual is clearly written and useful (except for at least one minor error: the camera icon is not on the lower left but upper left of the LCD screen ["Taking Images" p. 7]). The camera functions well. The high resolution still images I took (of blood and blue cheese) are fairly clear, and the videos of a tiny drop of aquarium water show an astounding assortment of active (albeit soon to die) microorganisms, probably in better focus than the ones observed by Leeuwenhoek. I now know why my fish seem to do well even if I forget to feed them. Illumination is appropriate, though clearly best suited for viewing transparent or semi-transparent specimens. I was especially surprised by the large amount of internal memory which, coupled with the video file format (3GP, normally used in mobile phones) permits a stunning number of image and video files to be stored. Downloading to a computer using a USB cable (supplied) is very easy - the camera simply shows up as a removable disk. If necessary, shareware conversion programs for 3GP to AVI or MPG format can be found and downloaded in a matter of minutes. The date default setting to January 9, 2031 is, however, more than a bit futuristic and might be a bug. The microscope I ordered did not suffer from the black spot on the monitor mentioned by several reviewers. I recommend this microscope for anyone who doesn't expect to get a $2000 instrument for one tenth of the price.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
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