Veho VMS-004 Discovery Deluxe USB Microscope with x400 Magnification & Flexi Alloy Stand

Instructions for Veho VMS--400 USB microscope

I write this as a professional microbiologist. This microscope is excellent but, at first, it seems impossible to use at high power [400x] because of inadequate instructions. I recommend practising on a simple flat object like a small piece of printed paper. Press the microscope firmly down onto it [or put the object into the lens cap] and focus at 20x. Now use the focus wheel to change to high power by rotating anticlockwise as far as it will go from that 20x position and then very slowly moving back until focus is achieved. [Note that it looks as if it should be possible to rotate a short distance from the 20 mark to the 400 mark on the focussing wheel. This is not the case. It is necessary to turn the wheel in the opposite direction to the 400 mark.]
As others have commented it is difficult to focus at 400x because the depth of field is small, the contrast is low and it is difficult to hold everything steady. This is not a fault of this microscope; it is true for the best professional instruments which overcome the problem by being very heavy, having precision engineered platforms for moving the object and special lighting systems (e.g. phase contrast). With the VMS-400 I recommend practicing focussing on a simple object as described above; it also may help to fix it to a heavy base or to place the object in the transparent lens cap. For smaller objects it is helpful to press them between glass slides for viewing at high power.

This is a great desktop gadget! It is fairly simple to instal and use, (i'm using vista) it also works well with programs like photoshop, under "import"
the settings make it quite versatile and you can choose a range of capture sizes.
The wheel allows focussing in either 20X or 400X (nothing in between) and at 400X the depth of field is quite shallow, so the object needs to be very close to the end of the microscope, and you have to be very gentle to get it in focus!
The microscope has a handy cap on the end which allows you to hold small objects or insects at just the right distance.
The supplied software is not bad either. it gives you access to all the settings and even allows you to measure the object usingthe scale on the focussing ring.
As with most reviews the stand is a little on the light side but is more than suffiecient to hold the microscope.
Well Recommended!
Thanks to amazon it arrived the day after it was ordered!

I have just taken delivery of the VMS-004 microscope. It works (eventually). As with many other reviews (including those on the VMS-001) I have to say that the instructions are less than helpful, both on the installation and the use of the scope. I suspect my problems have been similar to those mentioned in the other reviews, so apologies if I repeat some comments. And some of my problems have been the usual ones arising from not fully reading the documentation that did exist (although I had to read between the lines on quite a few points).

My first attempt at installation ... having read the reviews I skipped the instruction in the skimpy Quick Start Guide to plug in the scope before installing, so (using the supplied disk) the driver installation stopped and said it couldn't find the device, please plug it in! So I plugged it in and all went OK.

Starting the Microcapture software and up came a preview screen that looks terrible at first, but twiddling the knurled silver wheel brought things into focus. BUT the magnification looked nothing like the 400x promised - more like 12x. Turning the wheel did not zoom (as implied by the scale shown on the device), it is a Focus wheel (as it calls it in the manual) and the meaning of the scale was not immediately apparent. The use of the wheel is simply to focus on objects at different distances from the nose of the scope.

Changing the preview size (initially set at 640x480) to anything above 640x480 hung the software - which with hindsight could be a memory problem on my machine.

Thinking I may have had a software problem, I removed the Digital Microscope driver and Microcapture (via the Control Panel in XP) and downloaded the 'latest' software from the Veho site, unpacked the Zip, ran Microcapture.exe (i.e. the menu shown in AutoRun.inf) and reinstalled the driver and software. The NEW manual does say NOT to plug in the device before the installation. I did the installation OK then plugged in the scope, and XP seemed to find the device and driver OK. BUT Microcapture now said it couldn't find the scope, though XP could see the device. I tried a few things, but gave up, uninstalled and reinstalled using the CD (thinking it was better to have low magnification than no magnification!).

THEN I FOUND SOMETHING. Keep turning the knurled knob to the extreme 'other' end of its movement (ignoring the 'direction' of the scale) and there is a second focus point (as I then recalled reading in a review somewhere)! I reckon the magnification of a subject placed at the end of the plastic tube (having removed the clear cap) looked like about x250 on the preview window - not the advertised x400, but pretty good. When you think about it, it is obvious that the 'magnification' depends on how much you blow up the image.

THEN I READ THE MANUAL BETTER. When you do focus on an object near the end of the clear tube, the scale gives you a 'notional' magnification. If you then capture an image and open it in the Microcapture software (double click on the thumbnail), you enter that number on the preview screen and using the measurement ruler will give you a fairly accurate measure of the object seem in the image. The actual 'magnification depends on things like the resolution of your screen. I reckon the x400 would really be x400 if the image was printed at about A4 or a bit bigger.

The two focus points effectively give you something like x400 at one end and x20 at the other - i.e. the advertised x20-x400 doen't mean x20 TO x400 but x20 AND/OR x400.

So the 'old' installation using the supplied CD seems to works - the software still seems to hang with higher preview sizes, but hey, I have a working microscope. The 'updated' software doesn't seem to work at all (on my machine). And as a PS on the new downloaded software, the 'Install me(tm) software' option is never explained in the (new) manual - it seems that its a peer-to-peer client for the Diino online storage facility - something I wouldn't touch without knowing more about it and I can't think that it is in any way necessary for using the scope.

There's a moral in all this somewhere, but I'm not a philosopher!!

And as a Postscript - the driver for the scope is a Twain driver and works in File>Import in Abobe Photoshop (VMUVC Twain Driver) - and in that context the higher resolutions work OK if a bit slowly.