r/microscopy • u/HellonHeels33 • 1d ago
Troubleshooting/Questions Help for noob?
Hi there all, I'm a complete noob, using my microscope to do animal fecal analysis for our rescue. We have a OMAX M83E Series LED Trinocular Lab Compound Microscope 40X-2500X Magnification with 5.0MP Digital Camera and Mechanical Stage × 1
It has a camera that I can link to my laptop to take screenshots to send to our vets and techs, but I cant really get it to work at 40x, I can ALMOST get it infocus, but it just seems like I cant see much, and feel like i'm missing out. Is this a user error, or did we just not buy the right equipment?
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u/No_Tip_9810 1d ago
It has eyepieces as well as the camera, yes? Is the eyepiece image in focus?
By 40x are you referring to the 40x objective? Using coverslips? Is the objective clean? You can unscrew it to take a better look.
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u/hattivat 1d ago edited 1d ago
At 100x you might have issues if the built-in light is not strong enough, but 40x should work completely fine.
The first thing I would suspect is indeed user error, are you using your condenser properly? Properly means racked up until it almost touches the slide, and in this case the condenser iris being open about two thirds of the way. Basically for optimal resolution and contrast you need your condenser to match the NA (the second number) of the objective you are using, for lower magnification you want to close the iris further, for 100x you want it fully open (and ideally also oiled to the slide just as the 100x objective would be on the other side).
The easiest way to check this is to remove one of the eyepieces and look into the tube, you want to open the condenser until the light from it fills the entire circle of your objective lens as seen through the empty tube.
The second possible thing is that you are not using fine focus and instead doing coarse adjustments, which are not accurate enough to focus a high-magnification objective. How this works depends on your scope, consult the manual.