EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Other Equipment & Products => Topic started by: Pack34 on October 10, 2016, 01:09:53 pm
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I picked up an Amscope MU500 for my Amscope SM-3BZ-80S in hopes to be able to take some pictures for both internal documentation (testing and QC procedures) as well as in the event of an assembly house making mistakes.
The experience has been greatly... subpar. I've been running into the issue of silkscreen "glowing" even under low-exposure. This can be seen in the attachment to this post.
When experimenting with the settings I decided to test the camera on an old Olympus microscope that I had in the lab. The results on this were fantastic (see attachments). The glowing was gone and the image itself seemed to be sharper.
Looking at the difference between the two microscopes, the most immediate difference in the ring-light system. In the older Olympus the light is a fluorescent ring and the Amscope is a bunch of LEDs. The LEDs are not being diffused. After playing with a couple ad-hoc diffuser setups, there was definitely an improvement over the images taken, however, this was not the overall solution.
Even with the glowing in the center being mitigated, it seems the overall images of the sides of the image are "blurry". I'm wondering if this could be something related to there being a 0.5x lens on both the camera and the microscope. Looking through the eyepiece, the image is crystal clear and fantastic.
Has anyone here been able to get really good pictures out of their Amscope? I specifically picked the MU500 because of the available framerate. If doing rework under it I would need 30-60fps, which isn't available on their higher resolution cameras.
EDIT:// I fixed the Olympus image.
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That diffraction or haze reminds me of using wide open aperture on overly bright scenes. Is it possible you could make a sort of a lens hood and lower the intensity of your light? I don't think you can adjust the aperture on those. But in any case the issue looks to be optics/lens related.
A makeshift hood around your lens may prevent the unwanted stray light you're getting from entering the lens.
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That diffraction or haze reminds me of using wide open aperture on overly bright scenes. Is it possible you could make a sort of a lens hood and lower the intensity of your light? I don't think you can adjust the aperture on those. But in any case the issue looks to be optics/lens related.
A makeshift hood around your lens may prevent the unwanted stray light you're getting from entering the lens.
That's definitely something I haven't tried. I'll move the microscope setup into a dark room and give it another test and report back. Thanks!
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It's looking a bit better. I think I need to get my hands on n actual lens hood. I'm using a curled up sheet of white office paper.
On the Olympus microsocpe the ring light is located significantly above the bottom of the lens, but on the amscope it's right at the optics.