In this video we’re taking a look at a pocket microscope. I picked this up for around $6 on Amazon and by using the link in the description to get one for yourself, you help to support my videos and the Cool Tools blog.

I half bought this thing just to see what a tiny $6 microscope even looks like. It comes in this flimsy box, and understandably it’s mostly plastic, but what you get is fairly impressive.

The microscope itself is just this passive lens system that you can focus with your hand. But you also get this series of LEDs you can switch on to add extra light. Switched one way you can look at things under a UV light which is apparently handy for seeing anti-counterfeit marks on money.

I had microscopes as a kid, but they were always the classic style where you had to put samples on a slide, and they were more more or less fixed things.

What surprised me about this cheap, tiny microscope is how much fun it can be to just take it to anything out in the world — the wood grain on a table, the tread of a bike tire, the print in a comic book — all these little hidden worlds open up and you can just instantly peek at them.

If you have kids, it’s a slam dunk. Even if they already have a standard microscope, like my kid, the reaction to this was totally different.

Beyond the novelty, I’ve found this useful a few times for inspecting electronics projects and troubleshooting connections or reading little component values or serial numbers.

And I should also mention that I was able to use this with my smartphone camera to take closeup photos or videos. That’s actually how I shot a lot of this video here. So you can somewhat think of this as a super macro lens adapter for your phone.

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-- Donald Bell 05/29/18

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