Vision Engineering is one company that sells their own microscopes, or at least it's not obviously yet another version of the Chinese microscope that Amscope and many others sell with different branding.
They have got SX series that appears to be just the ticket for SMT rework, I was considering SX45 or SX45 trinocular for this. I didn't find any mention of these microscopes in this forum and in fact you have to kind of dig into it properly to come up with the company, instead of the bazillion SM-4/ZM-4 clones.. Has anyone actually used the SX45, are the optics in fact better or even worse? There's also SX80 and SX100 but eyeballing them the distance from your eyeballs to the end of the microscope is too long for easy rework.
SX45 is not hugely more expensive than the ZM-4, yes, it does cost significantly more than e.g. eleshop.eu ZM-4 kit, but nothing crazy like Kern asking 1950€ for the SM-4 with a boom stand..
And hey, it's a genuine British company you can visit in Woking if you feel so inclined.