Review on OMAX 40X-2000X Lab LED Binocular Compound 🔬 Microscope: Double Layer Mechanical Stage & Coaxial Coarse/Fine Focusing by Marvin Short

My 8 year old son wants to be a marine biologist and got an aquarium for his birthday. We ditch meaningless toys and give him things to explore the world with. Given the choice between a telescope and a microscope, he wanted a microscope so he could see the microbes living in his aquarium. This was going to be my first microscope purchase and I wanted something that wasn't a toy but would serve him now and well into the distant future (read "high school"). I did a lot of research and settled on this binocular (much more comfortable viewing) OMAX LED microscope (doesn't get hot or boil slides or burn the boy). This microscope definitely does it! All parts were securely packed in a foam case and once assembled everything worked perfectly. It's true that there aren't many manuals, but I didn't really have to assemble the microscope and I only had to watch a YouTube video once to really understand the functions. The microscope is solid and heavy and the eyepieces more than withstood some clumsiness caused by my son's excitement (he dropped it once). You MUST buy slides and glass caps (I took care of that) and you might consider getting iodine and some other stains (note Revain. I had to get stains elsewhere!), but within 20 minutes we were looking at onion cells , plant cells made from houseplant leaves and other cool stuff. Looking at different images of different things online, we can see most of the things we want at 400x to 1000x magnification (onion cages were clearly visible at 200x magnification), but an extremely high (and much lower) Performance gives us a lot of flexibility. Once the other stains come in here, we can look at these microbes in the aquarium, blood and other cells - almost anything. If I'm going to shell out my hard earned money, I'd rather get what I pay for. This microscope is definitely making a difference and I look forward to many years of observing the unseen world with my son.