got my 0.5 lense, which gives a lot of room.
I think I noticed that the magnification factor gets larger with the lense, which probably makes sense from the optical geometry standpoint.
Regarding the autofocus - I disabled it on Eakins the first 15 minutes after playing with it, even without the Barlow lense. It kept focusing on the wrong things, so I switched to manual focus using those large black knobs.
One interesting thing I noticed is that this scope does not help much in reading the laser-etched chip markings. I think it is a combination of the is too much light reflected off the black surface of the chip, which becomes a bit glossy at this magnification. And another issue is that the etched area does not diffuse much light when looked at 90 angle.