VMS-005-LCD Standalone USB Microscope
Let’s take a close look at this microscope. Closer, closer…
This looks fun! A microscope that can work completely stand-alone (thanks to a 3.5-inch screen, bundled 4GB microSD card and 1,050mAh battery), or can be hooked up to a Mac! Stills and video! We’re grown adults here at MacFormat, but we regressed to school children, crowding round, trying to find progressively more and more disgusting things (such as oily crisps) to look at in detail.
Sadly, our excitement was short-lived. Despite costing two hundred pounds, Veho seems to have skimped on the VMS-005-LCD just where it matters: the image sensor (the lens is lacklustre too, producing soft pictures). Images are often overly contrasty, and, perhaps worse, they’re usually noisy; there’s a system of white LEDs to illuminate your subject, but they don’t compensate.
Worse still, though it’s capable of five-megapixel stills when it’s working stand-alone, it maxes out at VGA resolution (640x480, or 0.3-megapixels) for both stills and video when connected to a Mac. The software too, while functional, is hardly a delight. And be wary of its claimed ‘1200x’ magnification; that’s achieved by just cropping into images, since the optical magnification tops out at 300x. Bragging about 1200x seems daft to us, since even 300x actually yields impressive results. You’re not going to see, say, individual plant cells, but it’s enough to reveal interesting detail in, say, fabric or some food.
Most of what we’ve said so far has been somewhat negative, but we will grudgingly allow that this is not an actively bad product – it’s merely a slightly disappointing and overpriced one. We wouldn’t recommend it for serious study, and we’d struggle to imagine many companies being happy with its results in commercial use – something Veho pushes – and while we still think £200 is too much money for the results, if you can afford to drop it on something that you’re only going to use for fun or to trigger a further thirst for knowledge either at home or in the classroom, then maybe, just maybe, this is the microscope for you. Christopher Phin