Digital Eyepieces for Microscopes?

tfiedler asks: "I'm trying to find a low cost digital eyepiece for my microscope, around $200 or so in cost, and have ran across very little useful information. I want something that can be plugged into my video capture card, so RCA or S-vid output is a requirement. I've found the following two products. The barrel for my microscope is 18mm in diameter. Does anyone have other suggestions, or any experience with the ones at the mentioned URLs? Additionally, has anyone done anything like this with a webcam?"

Comments

Using a webcam

[blate]

I have a friend who's into telescopes. He built a digital capture attachment for his telescope(s) using a logitech webcam (USB). He basically removed the existing lens assembly from the camera and mounted the imager inside/on/about a camera adapter for his telescope. I would imagine that the same technique would work for a microscope, and you could use an NTSC camera instead of a USB camera.

Apparently, it took him a couple trys (trial and error) to get the focal length and everything lined up properly, but it made some nice pictures.

Good luck :)

Re:Old Quickcams seem to work well for this.

[cybermace5]

The old Quickcams were actually pretty decent even by today's standards. Most of today's webcams use CMOS sensors, which really need to see a pretty bright scene before the signal-to-noise ratio becomes acceptable. The old cameras used CCD sensors. You can adjust the exposure down so far, that even very dark scenes can be viewed without all the graininess of a CMOS sensor.

My old Quickcam VC fell a long ways onto a tiled floor, which broke the ball housing. So I took out the internals and built them into a little pan/tilt platform using two RC servos and some heat-formed plexiglass: Plexicam