Meade 9460 Microscope

Rating:
Summary: Quality Insturment
Review: Our family and many of our friends home school our children and wanted a good microscope to assist with our biology studies. We searched the web for a quality microscope that would help make the subject interesting and enjoyable. Even though we thought the Meade 9460 Microscope to be a little pricey for our school group, we went ahead and bought. We were not disappointed! You get what you pay for. The high quality glass optics are clear and crisp, even at high magnification. The fine focus feature is a must, allowing the kids to focus easily and quickly. The moveable calibrated slide feature makes exploring each slide easy and thorough. The light with diaphram gives the viewer more control observing objects with different contrasts. The only thing I would like to see added with this microscope are a few more blank slides and an instruction book about making your own slides, and maybe some tricks about viewing. Other than those minor objections, this microscope has surpassed our expectations and is well worth the money. The extra features make using this scope enjoyable and easy enough for our nine year old son to operate. Our children have seen many different types of life found growing in water from an old bucket to a nearby river! Every week, our kids look forward to learning about biology and how small living things can be. The Meade 9460 Microscope made all this possible.

Rating:
Summary: Quality Insturment
Review: Our family and many of our friends home school our children and wanted a good microscope to assist with our biology studies. We searched the web for a quality microscope that would help make the subject interesting and enjoyable. Even though we thought the Meade 9460 Microscope to be a little pricey for our school group, we went ahead and bought. We were not disappointed! You get what you pay for. The high quality glass optics are clear and crisp, even at high magnification. The fine focus feature is a must, allowing the kids to focus easily and quickly. The moveable calibrated slide feature makes exploring each slide easy and thorough. The light with diaphram gives the viewer more control observing objects with different contrasts. The only thing I would like to see added with this microscope are a few more blank slides and an instruction book about making your own slides, and maybe some tricks about viewing. Other than those minor objections, this microscope has surpassed our expectations and is well worth the money. The extra features make using this scope enjoyable and easy enough for our nine year old son to operate. Our children have seen many different types of life found growing in water from an old bucket to a nearby river! Every week, our kids look forward to learning about biology and how small living things can be. The Meade 9460 Microscope made all this possible.

Rating:
Summary: Response to Chris Newman
Review: Scope is very good and Solid. Chris Newman (previous review) had problems with the 100X objective because it is an "Oil Immersion" lens and he was attempting to focus at that High Magnification (1000X) without applying a drop of oil between the objective and the slide. (The 9460 and 9600 come with a little bottle of oil in the box.)

Here is a snippet from a site explaining why oil is needed for this reason.
Remember that the 10x, 40x are dry focus lenses but the 100X requires "immersion oil".

Here is the snippet.

Oil Immersion: A microscopy technique to close the air gap between the tip of an objective and the top of the specimen with a drop of oil compounded with a refractive index to match that of the glass in the objective.  Once the objective contacts the oil droplet of matching refractivity, that portion of the optical system becomes a unit.  Immersion oil is the only suitable oil for that purpose in order to achieve very high magnifications, typically from 500x to 1,500x, and avoid damage to the objective. Because very high magnifications require a very oblique angle of entry for ray bundles, they will tend to reflect, refract, scatter and disperse, without forming a sharp image, unless a unifying medium is used.  Immersion oils are available in indices of refraction to match optics

Rating:
Summary: Response to Chris Newman
Review: Scope is very good and Solid. Chris Newman (previous review) had problems with the 100X objective because it is an "Oil Immersion" lens and he was attempting to focus at that High Magnification (1000X) without applying a drop of oil between the objective and the slide. (The 9460 and 9600 come with a little bottle of oil in the box.)

Here is a snippet from a site explaining why oil is needed for this reason.
Remember that the 10x, 40x are dry focus lenses but the 100X requires "immersion oil".

Here is the snippet.

Oil Immersion: A microscopy technique to close the air gap between the tip of an objective and the top of the specimen with a drop of oil compounded with a refractive index to match that of the glass in the objective.  Once the objective contacts the oil droplet of matching refractivity, that portion of the optical system becomes a unit.  Immersion oil is the only suitable oil for that purpose in order to achieve very high magnifications, typically from 500x to 1,500x, and avoid damage to the objective. Because very high magnifications require a very oblique angle of entry for ray bundles, they will tend to reflect, refract, scatter and disperse, without forming a sharp image, unless a unifying medium is used.  Immersion oils are available in indices of refraction to match optics

Rating:
Summary: Typical Meade
Review: The 9460 microscope is very good, with outstanding optics, and the "micrometric" slide adjustment was an unexpected pleasure. I'm glad I made the purchase; however...this product suffers from a typical Meade problem (and I own a very expensive Meade telescope too). The documentation is exceedingly poor. The scope comes with a very small descriptive pamphlet written in Chinglish. To Meade's credit, they do mention oil immersion lenses, but there is little, or no, mention of the aperture mechanism (which can be closed and translated), or the depth of field effects of the large objective lenses, etc.

With little effort, they could vastly improve the value of their products and ease the learning curve with more, and sometimes more accurate, descriptive material.

Rating:
Summary: Dramatic views of the microcosmic world
Review: This instrument provides a great learning experience for those wishing to observe matter at the microscopic level. Becoming interested in pond water, because of Biology class, I wanted my very own microscope that could view, in my case, protozoa (small single-celled creatures in pond water) at a highly magnified level. After much research, I would recommend this 9460 model, or the 9600 model,the latter having a binocular eyepiece head. There is a great difference in price though, yet both models have the same features, and same high powered magnification, the greatest at 1250x. The 9460 model is a value, and gives a valuable learning or researching experience. This is a great gift for a young, interested amateur scientist, or a student that is interested in researching or viewing the great diversity of "small" life; "up close and personal."

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed after reading other reviews
Review: This microscope comes with a 1 page hand book and, if like me you have not used a microscope before, you would have thought Meade could provide more detailed instructions.

I had no trouble using the 10x (100 magnification) objective lens. It looked sharp and was easy to focus. The 40x lens (400 magnification) was also easy to focus but did not produce a sharp image across the viewing area of the prepared slides provided. This may be the way it should be but who knows when Meade provide little to no information. The 100x optic (1000 magnification) I am unable to focus on any of their prepared slides. In fact I finished up damaging one slide by lowering the optic directly onto the glass. For all I know I may have damaged the optic as well! And this was by just using the fine focus. I did call Meade after being unable to focus the 100x optic and they very kindly (and at no cost) replaced all 3 optics. My guess is the optices were fine and it is my error but without a meaning full handbook who knows.