Home > Consumer Reviews > Carson Z-pix Digital Zoom Microscope

I purchased this as a present for my father who is a life long stamp collector to enable him to transfer pictures of his stamps to begin selling them. Although the focal lenght isn't long enough to include the entire stamp, we just made his ability to inspect the face and edges of his stamps VERY easy. Instead of looking at them bent over with a 2" square, hand held magnifier, he inspects them on a 15" laptop screen. Installation was a snap on a Vista laptop and the captured pictures are crystal clear.

This is an uncomplicated instrument that is well designed and works well. The MM-640D microscope can magnify from 26 times to 130 times. It is not the most powerful microscope on the market, but in this price range it is an excellent value. I bought it as a present for my youngest child, and she loves it.

It comes with software that installed quickly with no problems. Within minutes we were looking at veins on leaves, colored threads in dollar bills, and human and pet hair. The software lets you capture images in bmp format and movies in AVI format. Presumably you can make movies of bugs walking around or something like that.

There is a small plastic stand with a slide holder for looking at slides, and it comes with 3 slides. Slides are nice, but you don't really need them. You can use the microscope without the stand to look at the skin on your forehead, for example. (Lots of "ewwws" and "yucks" accompanied that view). You should be careful not to shine the light directly in your eyes.

There are two adjusting dials. The lower dial adjusts the zoom. The upper dial adjusts the focus. This seems well organized to me. I was pleased at how well the focus worked. The images were nice and clear.

My daughter has a science fair project coming up in a month or so. If you have ever been to a science fair, you know it mainly involves pasting pictures on a cardboard background. You can capture some nice pictures with this device, and print them, and they will look great on a science fair background. So hopefully my daughter will put it to good use.

this piece is a hoot and a quality piece of equipment. kids love it and professionally speaking, a new pair of glasses

This is a nifty little microscopic camera for uses involving 26X up to 130X. It works well and the software is easy to install and use. The fine print is that you need to know what magnification you want for your particular application. I read the reviews and noticed the one about the stamp collecting. I was looking for something for coin collecting so I thought I would try it. I found the lowest magnification to be to high for your first basic look at the coin. You can never see the entire coin/stamp at one time, only a very small limited section at high magnification. Consequently that will never work for cataloging your coins/stamps or pictures for internet auctions, etc. The basic magnification you need for a camera for coin/stamp collecting is 10X with higher magnification of 20X & 30X for detailed inspection. If this describes your needs let also warn you about microscopes with cameras. The description of the microscope magnification might start at 10X, but when you get it home you find the microscope goes to 10X but the camera will only go down to 20X. They won't tell you this in the description and you have the same problem I have with this product. If you need a camera with the lower magnifications of 5X/10X be very wary about what you buy.

This thing is great, my daughter loved it right out of the box and kept bringing things over to put under it. Comes with Windows and Mac drivers. Not sure if there are Linux drivers from a third party, its not impossible, since its basically a webcam.

Resolution on this model 640 is 640x480 or 0.3 megapixel. Carson also makes a model 740. They don't specify its exact resolution anywhere but they say it is 1.3 megapixel; maybe that equals 1280x1024 (maybe). Carson needs to specify both models in the same units. If they can confirm the resolution of the other model, that one would have been worth 33% more cost for 400% more pixels. If only someone had written a review like this one to tell me about it. So now you know.

It would be technically possible for Carson to make a scope that uses existing Mac drivers but anyway their driver CD was easy to use. Only other slight minus is of course you need higher power 1000x to see bacteria. But this will get your kid started for sure.