Turn Your Smartphone into a Digital Microscope | The Apexel 300x Tested

300 times magnification, a microscope that clips over your phone, and costs around £40 or $50. Too good to be true? Well, maybe it is. This is the Apexel 300X smartphone microscope. I bought it myself with my own money, and this is my honest review. First, let me show you what you get. In the box, there's this little device, a lens with a circle of lights around it, and that is clipped into this little frame. There's also a charging cable and a little bag to put them in. To use it, you need to position the unit on your phone with a lens right over the phone's main camera. To do that, you first need to remove the lens unit from the frame. You can do that by pressing this button. [clears throat] The frame unit has a springy expander that you just pull out and then release to clip over your phone. I've tried this with this fairly small old iPhone and also with this bigger CMF2 Pro phone. It fits both equally well. You need to be careful if your phone has any side buttons near the camera as this attachment could press against them. though I have to say that has not been a problem with my phones. You then need to position the hole over the camera lens. You can do that by loosening this screw and sliding this little bracket. Make sure you put it over the camera lens that is currently being used. If your phone has more than one camera, then clip the microscope part back into the mounting frame and you're all ready to go. You might first want to charge it using the USB cable in this slot. Unlike a desk mounted microscope in which light shines through a slide into the microscope lens, with this the light shines down onto whatever you're viewing. That's why it has to be charged. It has a ring of lights around the lens. To turn the lights on, you press this button at the top. Then you can change the lighting by pressing another button at the bottom. This cycles through white or yellowy colored lights and full circle illumination or illumination from one side only. In theory, this might improve the resolution of certain three-dimensional features, say the ridges of woven materials or embossing on coins. Though in practice, I found that the full circles of lighting produce the best results. There's also an ultraviolet option. That's for photographing things such as minerals that may flues under ultraviolet. Pressing the top button increases or decreases the brightness. To use it, I just turn on the lights and put the lens right up against something. Here, for example, I'm looking at the text on the instruction booklet that came with the lens. This is what I see on my camera, and I just take a still picture or a video in the usual way. And this is the result. And this is my pullover. And here's a [snorts] 5P coin. So, these are pretty good results, I think. But is that really 300 times magnification? Well, not really. If you look at an object at 300 times magnification using a desktop laboratory style microscope, you will see far greater enlargement and much finer details than you will with this. Subjectively, I'd say this device enlarges by tens rather than by hundreds. So, how does the manufacturer arrive at the 300 times claim? I contacted the company twice. once by email and then again using their online contact form asking for technical details, but so far I have had no reply. On the Amazon UK page, the product description says that when combined with your smartphone's digital zoom, this provides up to 300 times optical magnification. Well, I'm not sure what the word optical means here, but anyway, this statement is missing from the product description on the American Amazon page. Instead, it says rather vaguely that different foam lens parameters and focus distances will produce different magnification effects. I haven't been able to find any documentation that states exactly how much digital zoom is needed to achieve a 300 times magnification. I tried it with up to 10 times digital zoom in my CMF phone and you can see the results. This is my pullover without digital zoom and here it's been zoomed at 10 times. I also tried with some professionally prepared microscope slides. This is a fly's leg at standard magnification with no digital zoom. But a fly's leg is relatively big. So I tried something smaller. Here is parramium, a tiny microorganism without any digital zoom. And here it is again, but this time with my phone's digital zoom at 10 times magnification. So forget the 300 times claim. that is at best open to interpretation. But even allowing for the fact that the optical magnification is much lower than 300 times, the results are still pretty good. There are a couple of things that you need to be aware of when using this though. Some phones auto switch to a different camera when you zoom in. My CMF phone does that. So when I zoom in, the camera to which the phone switches is obscured by the lens holder. It's just over the alternative camera lens and I see nothing at all. So to zoom in, you either have to disable camera switching if that's an option, which it may not be. I certainly haven't found the option on my phone. Or you could use a different camera app. Or you can do what I did, and that is to physically move the camera microscope attachment to be centered over whichever camera your phone switches to when digital zoom is enabled. Another thing to bear in mind is that you will only get good quality, sharp focus pictures when the microscope attachment is flat up against whatever you're looking at. So paper and microscope slides and materials like my pullover are fine. Leaves of plants can be quite hard to get in focus though, particularly if they're crinkly like a cabbage or wavy like a holly leaf. Flowers and insects or anything with a highle three-dimensional shape. Maybe almost impossible. If that's what you want, I think you'd probably get better results with a dedicated macro lens or maybe with some of Apex's lower magnification microscope attachments. though I personally haven't tried those. So, in conclusion, is this worth the money? Well, the short answer is yes. If you want an inexpensive, portable, high magnification attachment for your camera, this can produce very good results. It's not suitable for macro photography such as insects and flowers and other three-dimensional objects. and its claim to provide 300 times magnification is to be generous open to interpretation. In fact, I think that claim is so ambiguous that it should be explained much more clearly in the product advertising. You do need to use a camera's digital zoom to achieve anything like that level of magnification. So, as long as you know what you're getting and what it's suitable for, this can produce good results. But if you think you're getting a tiny and cheap alternative to a 300 power desktop microscope, well, you are likely to be disappointed. Anyway, I hope this has been useful. Be sure to subscribe to my channel and I'll be back soon with more interesting stuff.

Can a tiny, inexpensive clip-on lens for a smartphone really show you the microscopic world at 300 times magnification? #apexel #smartphone #microscope This is my honest (unsponsored) review of the Apexel 300x Smartphone microphone. For around $50, this claims to turn your phone into a powerful hand-held microscope that lets you watch, photograph and video anything from fabrics to microorganisms. But is it genuine? Does it really live up to its publicity? In this video, I take an in-depth look at the Apexel 300x, showing you what it is, how it works and the results you can get. My conclusions might surprise you. On the one hand, this is a really useful add-on for your iPhone or android phone. On the other hand, its claimed 300 times magnification may not be quite what you think it is. If you are interested in microscopes and microscopy or you simply want to zoom in to get super enlarged close-up shots of materials, minerals and microscopic organisms, then this could be what you need. You can buy this Smartphone Microscope on Amazon. I’ve put the links below. I bought this item with my own money and the links are NOT affiliate links. This is a completely impartial review. Amazon (US): https://www.amazon.com/APEXEL-Microscope-PhoneMicro-Smartphone-Attachment/dp/B0FJDDHDWY/?th=1 Amazon (UK) https://www.amazon.co.uk/APEXEL-300X-Smartphone-Microscope-Professional/dp/B0FJY1LR5F/