Review on Celestron Digital Microscope Imager 44422 by Melanee Deal

1. "The image is too enlarged!" because you selected a photo or video resolution of 1920x1080. This is not the camera's native resolution and will be scaled/cropped. Choose the 960P resolution and suddenly you see the same field of view as the eyepieces. It also greatly improves the picture quality.2. The sensor has a maximum resolution of 1920x1080 (2MP) and is NOT a 5MP sensor. This is the actual resolution determined by the Mac camera or Windows camera software. You will only see the 2560 resolution offered in the included Celestron software as that software upscales the 2MP image. This is not a true resolution.3. The CCD is protected by a glass IR filter at the end of the camera, but this glass IR filter is not protected by anything. You NEED an end cap when the camera is not in the microscope or you will scratch the lens and get dust. It doesn't come with one. I used a small black felt bag for this.4. There is absolutely NO manual control of camera, gain, contrast, brightness, ISO or shutter speed. Regardless of the software, the camera is always in fully automatic mode and cannot be overridden. You can adjust "Gamma, Brightness, Contrast" in the Celestron software and in your operating system's camera app, but it only adjusts how it appears on the screen, not the camera itself. This means you can use the Fstop of the condenser or changing the brightness of your light, or moving the slider from light to dark areas, the image keeps getting lighter and darker, and it often underexposes light images, so if you have a lot of white (like the area around your sample) instead of White you get a dull grey, dark image. I haven't found a way to counteract this. Those pitfalls aside, it basically plugs into any microscope and you don't need any special drivers to use it. It is recognized as a Mac or Windows camera and just works. The camera itself has a 20x zoom factor, so using 10x eyepieces will magnify the camera image about 2x. With a 4x lens I can still see the entire cross-section of a plant stem in one image when used at 960P. At 1080p, the image is magnified to the point of being almost impossible to use.