excellent piece of kit
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.
More detail ...
No comments:
Post a Comment