AmScope4.3 inch Premium 1080P HD Portable LCD Digital Color Microscope with Dual-LED Illumination - DM140

works great out of the box. Up and running in a few minutes with a great display. Great for kids + dad.

Easy to use with excellent sharpness. Adjustable focusing and light. Get a set of prepared and/or blank slides to go with it. Seven yr old granddaughter caught right on to how to use it.

I bought this as a Christmas gift for my five year old grandson since he was recently showing an interest in using my own microscopes. It's great value for the money and far better than a typical children's scope.What I like about it.1. The controls for both focus and lighting are easy to use. The controls and indeed the whole frame seem rugged.2. The ability to separate the scope from the frame and carry it around (see photo) make it great for outdoor exploration. The use of a rechargeable battery makes this possible.3. The ability to use both see through lighting (from the bottom) and top down lighting (from the top) allows you to use the scope for things like pond life as well as for stamp and coin inspection4. The inclusion of a slide holder and three circular filters that snap into place above the bottom light allow for a variety of effects. The fact that the filter slot is 32 mm in size allows it to accept standard microscope filters from 'adult' microscopes. A nice touch.5. The image quality is excellent. See illustrations.6. I like the ability to control image settings such as resolution, image quality and white balance (children will need help understanding these but that's OK since an adult can set it up and the defaults are fine).7. I like the support for both video and image capture.8. It's small and lightweight but the screen is just the right size.9. The packaging was excellent.What could be improved.1. The controls on the remote are spongy. In fact, one of the buttons came off after only light use. I was able to get it back in but it seems like a point of failure considering the market is children. I realize the remote is not absolutely necessary since the controls are also available on the screen but the use of a remote to prevent vibration when an image is saved is nice.2. The controls on the screen are not intuitive. It would be nice if the default setting was to use image capture instead of video capture. A slight annoyance.3. The use of a micro SD card instead of a standard SD card is understandable I suppose to save space and cost but the slot is very hard to reach and doesn't seem rugged. I'm thinking that it could fail. btw, these kinds of cards are so very inexpensive it would have been nice to include a low storage one in the slot. They're basically free.One last observation is that AmScope is missing an opportunity to allow children of all ages (including adults) to share their pictures from this and other scopes. It would be fun and promote the use of microscopes.