Review on Celestron Digital Microscope Imager 44422 by Robin Nelson

Let's start with the good points of this very inexpensive camera. This will probably be enough for a beginner kid who has absolutely no experience and no expectations. It will capture a rough image of some of what you see, but the image will be poorly exposed and the white balance will vary wildly. It can easily take a rough picture. The software is definitely the weak link, although the camera itself isn't much better. The first problem with the software is that it is not possible to see the entire image area on the screen. If you open the software, you immediately get a live image from the camera, but you only see a tiny part of this already small image area. Changing the settings has no effect on the display screen. I'm using a 4K monitor, so I have enough resolution on my display to actually see the entire 5 megapixel screen at once, but the software doesn't seem to allow it. The software is complicated by the fact that since the imaging camera has such a tiny sensor (1/2.5 inch) you get at best twice the image of what you see in the eyepiece. The live view in the software only shows a tiny part of this tiny 2x camera image. So I just accepted the fact that maybe this live view screen is just for focusing, so I focus and take a picture. . The snapshot is a slow, laggy process that takes about 3 seconds in total. Why? It's a pathetic tiny picture! Resolution 5 megapixels. This software is slow, clunky, quirky and offers very little control. The image quality is really bad. Moustache. The camera tends to blow out/overexpose highlights resulting in really horrible images. There are some elementary controls in the software settings, but that doesn't help. Highlights always look overexposed and washed out no matter how much I turn the brightness down. Even if you change the settings to make the images look a little better, the next time you open the software you'll have to change the settings again because the software always falls back to the default settings (which are awful). The white balance is always wildly off. My images become noisy and yellow. rich, dark yellow. I can manually adjust the white balance setting from the default 6000K to 2700K, but the image has color balance issues that vary across the image. For example, the left third of the image always has a magenta tint to my photographer's eyes. Permit. When I calculated the required resolution for different lenses when using this camera, I found that this camera does not have sufficient resolution when using a 4x lens and this is evident in the images. Zooming in to 10x improves the image, but it's still grainy, dull, very "fuzzy," and has the exposure and white balance issues mentioned above. This cheap camera definitely has problems with its old and tiny sensor, but the biggest problem is in the software. I can't get this camera to work with any other software package, which only makes the problem worse. Perhaps if I could use better software I could have more control over the camera instead of dwelling on the crude controls in the Celestron software. Unfortunately I'm stuck with the lousy Celestron software and that software really makes this camera unusable. My current workaround is to use one of my cameras instead of using this Celestron HD Imager. It's uncomfortable, but the resulting images and videos are far better than what this Celestron package can produce.