AmScope M150C-SP14-CLS-50P100S-WM 40X-1000X Portable Student Microscope with Extensive Slide Preparation Kit and Book

Very good scope for family and school use. It is well made, sturdy, with good optics. The prepared slides are fair, nothing special, but the rest of the package is quite handy. I am satisfied with my purchase.

No stage maneuverability was disappointing. Lots of Neat things to look at. Well made.

I received one of these binocular scopes as a gift from a friend who no longer used it. It works better than a magnifying hood for detecting fine cracks or component IDs on circuit boards.

It seems like a decent microscope. This model, M150C, was recommended in our homeschool curriculum, and as I also needed slides and methylene blue, it seemed like this kit would be the best value. The instructions say to check the tightness of the objective lenses which I did, everything was snug, but it said nothing about the eyepiece. There was a wire piece that sort of cut into the view, I wasn't sure if it was necessary or if it was something to hold the lenses more secure in shipping. But, that's not an issue for us now. When my daughter swapped the 10x eyepiece for the 25x eyepiece part of it fell back into the body tube and the wire and one of the lenses ended up on the floor. I finally figured out how to put it back together, (minus the wire as it wasn't found for a few days) but one or both of the lenses in the 10x eyepiece have scratches or small chips that show up when trying to look at slides. The 25x eyepiece works with the premade slides but, seems to be pointless for slides that we've made. You can probably tell from the photo that the cover slides are square. This seems strange to me, as when I was younger, we used another slide as a cover slide so we could seal together the two pieces. We'd label one of the sides where the slides were taped together. I had thought about possibly buying a case for the slides my daughter made, but this would be pointless as the cover would fall off when being put on their side so, for now, we just stack the slides. Not the greatest way to care for slides, but it seems to be our only option. The methylene blue is a little rock in a bottle that needs to have water added to it. There were no instructions on how much water to add, so I just added as much water as I could without squirting all the blue back out, (the bottle's top doesn't come off so you have to squeeze the bottle underwater.)

Our Grandson who is 7 has been enjoying this microscope since Christmas! He loves using the internet to help him discover new things to look for in certain items. In his words: Best Gift Ever!