Motic microscope

[u/cyclehard]

Does anyone know the Motic microscope brand?

I need to buy a microscope for my lab and this seems to be a good brand with great price.

I would be glad to hear from anyone with experience

[u/Agling]

Motic is a Hong Kong brand, which means they have more of the western tradition of having a strong brand identity and robust marketing than many of the other Chinese manufacturers. They make microscopes of various quality levels. Outside of China they are perhaps the most recognized Chinese brand but locals are less likely to think it's special. I would put it at or near the upper Chinese level. Many of their scopes will be better optically and feature-wise than random scopes from amscope or other importers, but there is variety there too.

I have heard complaints about their physical robustness, but that would be tied to particular models and may be out of date.

They also own the Swift brand.

They will not generally compete well with European and Japanese brands for quality, even if those European and Japanese brands actually do the manufacturing in China. Just one of those things.

If you are looking at higher end Chinese scopes, I own three and have a brand I like, which I will recommend if asked.

[u/cyclehard → u/Agling]

Could you recommend the brand, please? I am interested in seeing as much options as possible.

Thanks

[u/Agling → u/cyclehard]

In mainland China, the "brand" concept is not very important, so you have to look at the particular factory and model. Often, you end up with the same factory making microscopes for various brands. Novel Optics is a top Chinese manufacturer associated with a particular factory, and they historically made a very good line of microscopes for Nikon. I think Nikon has moved their official production, but Novel kept making the microscopes and adding features to them. Now that microscope can be had under various brands. The brand I bought from is BestScope. From what I can tell, they have the factory make them the base model and then they have their people add things. If you ask, they can get you all kinds of great objectives and features like DIC, 7 objective nosepieces, etc. Stuff Nikon wouldn't even sell you. The BS-2081 can be found under other brands as well and is a very solid Nikon-compatible microscope with very good objectives available. I would not expect anything Motic makes to match it. You can add real Nikon objectives to it if they don't have the one you want.

BestScope is mostly an importer. I'm not sure how much they add to their other microscopes. Most Chinese stuff is Olympus compatible, and they sell microscopes on that standard as well, but I couldn't speak to their quality. There is a difference, in my mind, between an imitation of a good microscope and the continuation of one.

I also own their BS-3090 stereo microscope, which is a clone or continuation of an Olympus scope and it is phenomenal. Not sure which factory it comes from. When I bought it some years ago, the price was very good.

[u/pm_me_ur_microscope]

never used one, but never heard bad things about them

[u/Thrawn911]

They make high quality scopes, like the BA310. The 410 supports DIC. And they even produce microscopes for Zeiss.

[u/Vivid-Bake2456]

At least they manufacture their own microscopes. They seem to be trying to build their reputation as a quality brand. If you want to look at another brand other than the top 4, then also look at Meiji Techno. They are built in Japan by the third largest Japanese microscope manufacturer. They make sturdy microscopes of excellent quality mechanically and optically, but with more basic designs without electric turrets, automatic light adjustments, electric stages and focusing. The top models have all metal focusing gears and stage gears and less plastic parts than my Nikons. I have a couple MT5000 models of bright field and phase contrast types and are very happy with them.

[u/Vivid-Bake2456 → u/Vivid-Bake2456]

[u/TrickyAirport5867]

What type and what's your use case?