FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Tomasz Praszkier]

Jesse, I was looking on their web page. Thay have only VSI SZ - and I never herd about this binoculars...

[Jesse Fisher]

Tom,

I have found a website for a company called OptekUSA that has a very good selection of used stereo microscopes including Olympus, Nikon, Bausch & Lomb and Leica. Unfortunately for you, they are also here in California, but given the strong Euro right now, perhaps this helps a little. I am not familiar with the microscopes that Mineralogical Research sells, so can not say anything about them.

Jesse

[Tomasz Praszkier]

Thank you Jesse, that helps me a lot.
I found NIKON SMZ-2B on reasonable price. Have you got any experience with that?
I think I will buy this one or Nikon SMZ 645, but I can not find any place were I can really compare them. I understand that SMZ-2B is an old model but better quality - is that true?

Sorry for asking so many questions about stupid microscopes :-)

[Tom Tucker]

Tom, check out the helpful microscope information found on the website of Absolute Clarity and Calibration. They were mineral collectors, and present a lot of helpful information. And they will answer any questions about any 'scopes. Tom

[Jesse Fisher]

Tom - Unfortunately, I have not used many Nikon stereoscopes and am not familiar with the individual models. I have used many of their petrographic scopes and they are generally of very good quality, better than Olympus. In this case, older may be better. In my experience after the early 1980s many microscope manufactures began to produce lower quality instruments in order to keep the price down.

Before you buy a used microscope you should always check it to see if there is good resolution and there is no spherical or chromatic aberration in the optics. Also, if it has a zoom adjustment for magnification (most modern scopes do) you should make sure that it remains in focus through the entire range of the zoom adjustment.

Jesse

[Tomasz Praszkier]

Sorry for coming back so late to that topic. As was told before I purchased Meiji SMZ 8TR with long arm stand, fiberoptic light. I connected to microscope camera Nikon D90.
After using that few months I have to say that this is great microscope, very clear, sharp view, fluent zoom etc. I am amazed about quality! Photos are not so good, just ordinary documentation photos (I was not expect anything better). There is a problem that view in microscope is very different from view by camera, there is also problem of sharpness of pictures.
I am posting some photos taken in first day by this equipment and also photos of whole set up.
Thank you again for help to all of you! To select wright one was not easy, but I had luck :-)

[Jesse Fisher]

Tom,
You will notice that your photos are in focus at the center of the field of view but are out of focus at the top and bottom. This is usually the result of shperical abberation in the lenses of the microscope. Is there an eye-piece lens in the camera tube below the camera? If not, you are getting a very wide field view through the microscope optics. If you insert a 5x or 10x eye-piece into the into the camera tube this will magnify the image and your camera will only be seeing the center of the field you do without it. This will give you a smaller field of view but may help eliminate the abberation at the edges.