I have an older B&L Stereozoom 4 that works quite well. I was given the head and a couple of stand parts many years back but had to build the base and arm pipes.
The important thing is not to go too high on the magnificaiton. With higher magnificaitons your vield of view is restricted, you have limited depth of field and the lense to object distances becomes quite close, making soldering a problem.
The zoom head of my microscope goes from .7x to 3x. The head came with 15X eye pieces which I changed out to 10X for a net power of 7x to 30x. To this I added a .5X Barlow auxiliary objective lense to reduce magnificaiton by 50% and double the lense to object distance for easer soldering. The net magnificaiton is now 3.5x to 15x which is just about what you need. I can always remove the Barlow and double the power.
You also want a long arm stand so larger boards are not a problem. I can swing the head over the edge of my bench to gain access to boards mounted in some chassis or assembly. Also get an LED ring light for illumination.
Craig
--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "mcjonster" <mcjonster@...> wrote:
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> I'm looking for suggestions on a decent stereo microscope. There are many options on ebay but I have no idea what is good for SMD PCB work.
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> It'd be nice to be able to solder or fix stuff as well as inspect.
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> Also, I was thinking that maybe a good option would be a digital microscope like this one: http://www.carsonoptical.com/Pocket_Microscopes/Pocket_Microscopes/MM-480B
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> I always seemed to have problems looking through a microscope lens as whenever I blink I'd see my eyelashes and stuff but I probably just didn't know what I was doing.
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> Anyway, it sounds like a good idea to get a digital one which I could hook up to my netbook. Any experiences/suggestions?
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