Review on 🔬 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Dual Student Microscope: Unleashing the World of Exploration by John Reese

This small microscope is ideal for beginners. The included booklet is mostly about slide viewing, but things get better at 20x magnification with top lighting for viewing solid objects. I placed a stalk of Coleus flowers underneath and saw pollen in the anthers and pollen attached to the stigma leaves. You can examine tiny flowers in their entirety or parts of larger flowers. Small insects and leaf margins are other good specimens. I think this will work well for observing algae and some organisms in the pond water. It won't show you much detail about protozoa, but it can see a lot. A NOTICE. There is no indication in the instructions that the diffuser glass is not fixed in the base or that it must be placed frosted side down. There are no instructions to remove the lens' lenses before inverting it to insert the batteries, but they should be. Targets may fall during this process. In order to view the slides, you must change the targets. This microscope is not suitable for viewing slides, mainly because its magnification is limited to 50x magnification. The included onion skin slide was good, but the cells in many others are too small to see. Some slides contain debris in addition to the sample, but these are much better than the artificial slides that come with toy microscopes. I compared the slides in this kit to my collection of slides that I purchased from a major educational provider. In general, it should be used at 20x magnification. It's made of plastic, so you need to be careful with it.