Microscopy

I have a 'broken' Sumiko Blue Point Special MC phono cartridge. I thought it might serve as an interesting model for some photos. The top two were scanned at high resolution on a Umax flatbed scanner. (Astra 1200S). The others are captured images taken with an Intel Play + 'toy microscope' I recently acquired.

Click on thumbnail image to view the full size photo.

Scanned images below:

scanned at 1200 dpi then reduced for web viewing

scanned at 4800 dpi then reduced for web viewing

Intel Play + Microscope images below:

60x view of armature

a view of the broken cantelever at 60x

200x top view

200x front view

reference info: nude mounted, elliptical stylus. Tip diameter, .0007 inches.

a 200x view of the stylus

a 60x side view of cantilever and stylus

200x side view

some notes:

The toy microscope comes with some software designed for grade-schoolers. My biggest complaint about the software is that it takes over the Operating System when launched and forces an 800 x 600 resolution using whatever color depth was previously set for the desktop. My OS is Win2Kpro. I typically use a resolution of 1280 x 1024 with either 16-bit or 32-bit color depth. The forced resolution change really screws with my desktop arrangement by moving my neatly arranged icons around and then requires a re-setting of the screen resolution after each microscope session. My solution is to just use the software drivers for the microscope and operate it's function through the twain 32 import feature of Photoshop. This appears to be a neat solution should anyone be in a position to try this.

link:

a good info site for the Intel Play toy microscope can be found here:

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/optics/intelplay/index.html

Just having some fun.

comments to: user510@earthlink.net