Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Veho VMS-004, 20-400x Magnification USB Digital Microscope Camera with 2 Mega Pixel Cmos lens (interpolated) and alloy flexi-stand and measurement software at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users.
Microscope - USB digital - Veho VMS-001 - as used on a Linux PC, with 'guvcview' Microscope - USB digital the Veho VMS-001 as used on a Linux PC, with 'guvcview' This Veho Digital Microscope (on Linux) page! Some information (and images and links) may be added, if/when I re-visit this page. Sections below: (to the microscope) (for Linux - 'guvcview') (for running 'guvcview') (captured using 'guvcview') Introduction: The Veho VMS-001 'USB microscope' is a low-cost (less than $60) microscope that can be plugged into a USB port on a personal computer to view small objects with a 20 to 200 factor of magnification. There are better microscopes that facilitate precise and non-frustrating focusing (frustration is discussed below), but they generally cost about $170 or more. The microscope has 8 built-in LED lights that provide good lighting of the object. There is a dial that can be used to adjust the amount of light shining on the object.
You can capture still images in the JPEG image file format, and you can capture videos in the AVI video file format. (You can use software on your computer to convert the image and video files to other formats. There are many such conversion programs free available for the Linux operating system.) You can see some examples of static image captures in the section below. The three main controls on the microscope (other than the double-jointed stand, used to adjust the distance from the microscope aperture to the object of interest) are. brightness control (dial) for the circle of 8 LED lights.
knurled, rotating built-in cylinder for adjusting focus. a snapshot button The snapshot button is rather useless because it moves the microscope when you try to take a picture. This is reported to result in fuzzy pictures. It is better to use the image-capture button of the software for your operating system to capture an image. You will need the brightness control dial and the knurled focus-knob, but they have the disadvantage of moving the microscope when you try to turn them. Neither of them is easy to turn.
The knurled focusing-knob on mine is especially hard to turn, so if you have spent a lot of time positioning the microscope (with the double-jointed stand) and positioning your specimen (on a slide or jar lid or whatever), it is especially frustrating when you undo the positioning by trying to rotate the knurled knob to focus properly - or by trying to rotate the brightness dial to change the lighting. FEEDBACK to low-cost USB Microscope makers: You need to put brightness and focus controls on a pad separate from the microscope - or, at least, you need to make sure that each unit is manufactured so that both of those dials turn easily - at a feather touch. Microscope documentation: A user manual for the Veho VMS-001 can be seen via this 25-page. In particular, note that the Veho manual says it supports Still capture resolutions of: 2560x2048 (5M interpolated), 2000x1600, 1600x1280 (2M non-interpolated), 1280x1024, 1024x960, 1024x768, 800x600, 640x480, 352x288, 320x240, 160x120 And the Veho manual says it supports the same Video capture resolutions. Unfortunately, many people report that they have only been able to achieve a max of 640x480 resolution. I have had the same experience (up to 2010 Aug 07) when using the 'guvcview' software on Linux (described below) to control image captures.
If I find a combination of parameters that overcomes that limitation, I plan to report it on this web page. Here is a video showing a 2 minute demo of the microscope. Microscope software The Veho microscope comes with a small CD disc that holds the PDF manual and two installations of image capture software: one for MS Windows computers and one for Mac computers. The Veho manual spends most of its pages describing the use of the user interfaces of these two installations of the image capture software.
Since I use the software on a Linux computer (using Ubuntu 9.10) and since there is no detailed description of how to use the microscope under Linux, I provide such a desription below, using the 'guvcview' program that is easily installed on Ubuntu Linux with a few mouse clicks - via the 'Ubuntu Software Center' option. (Before buying the microscope, I found some postings on the internet where people announced that they were able to use the Veho VMS-001 USB microscope on their Linux machines.