I’m old. I’ve recently had more and more occasions to reach for a magnifying glass. What voltage is printed on this little wall wart? What the hell do these Chinese instructions say? What’s caught in that USB connector?
I reach for a plain magnifying glass, but I really need some more illumination. Plus, I can’t adjust the magnification. I also have an illuminated magnifier on a stand with a circular LED illuminator, but it’s big and heavy and stored up in the top of my closet. I could get out one of my Canon cameras and hook up the USB cable, but that’s a pain, too. My Samsung S7 is barely adequate and the light from the flash is not the best.
What I think I want is a USB camera that has a set of illuminating LEDs and can focus at a short distance. But I don’t really need the high magnification of a microscope. Maybe 20X to 50X would do the trick? I just want to pull something out of my end table drawer, plug it into my laptop, open a camera app, and read the fine print…or read the small engraved part numbers…or see that I bent an HDMI pin. And I want it on my FHD laptop screen.
Suggestions, anyone? Any experience with $40-$50 units? Is there an option I’m missing? I just want simple, fast, handy, and inexpensive.
Once again…I’m old. Be gentle. And get off my f*****g lawn.
I had followed something like your same thought sequence and wound up with a USB camera, and it really doesn’t work, in the sense that it is much too high a magnification, so impossible to hold still enough, very difficult to find the thing I’m trying to look at, and so forth. I think a much lower magnification is called for.
I don’t know how they define the magnification. They don’t know the size of window you will have on your computer screen. If they’re defining the optical magnification, a magnification of 1X would fill the tiny image sensing chip with whatever you’re looking at, and that would be a great deal of magnification.
I have an iPhone 13 something something, the largest one, with a “macro” lens. It’s pretty good. Though, really, leaving magnifying glasses all over actually works best, and maybe having a few good lamps around too. Now the biggest challenge is when I’m trying to look at something on myself in a spot I can’t reach well, such as a tick somewhere around my side.
I just tried using a magnifier app on my phone (Samsung Galaxy S8) and it seems to work pretty well. My original fear is that I would not be able to hold it steady, but it is not as bad as I thought it might be. This is one reason I was thinking about a cam that could clamp to my laptop or use a small stand. (Example: I needed to read the info on a very small wall wart. The text was molded, not printed, so it needed to be at a certain angle to catch the light correctly. Much easier under a fixed magnifying glass.)
Yes, I do have magnifying glasses, but being able to capture the image for future reference is very helpful. In the example above (wall wart), it was the one that powers my ONT, so I wanted to remove it briefly and then save the info.
Thanks,everyone! I’m going to try the magnifying app on my cell phone and on one of my smaller Lenovo tablets.
A colleague here at work has a pair of Walgreen’s style glasses that magnify, but it also has lights on either side that illuminate! This would give you the two things you need and leave your hands free.
If you do find that problematic, try taking an actual picture, and then look at the result. Your phone likely has some pretty impressive image stabilization algorithm, and will be able to get something readable for you.
I have to admit that my recent pictures have been a bit blurred. My wife complains about the same thing. We tried to take a picture of our Christmas lights after dark the other night and it took several attempts to get satisfactory results. It’s probably not the phone or camera…we’re just really bad and awkward at holding the phone and pressing the button. This is especially true if using only one hand. (See above example: unplug wall wart, hold in one hand, and try to take a pic with the other.)
It’s very hard to hold a camera or phone steady enough in the dark to take good pictures. The image requires a longer exposure time, which means that any motion has more time to register on the image. And phones are awkward to hold. Hopefully, this wouldn’t be as much of a problem if you are taking a well-lit photograph to magnify. Good luck!