Photography Asked on July 13, 2021
Apologies if this isn’t the right place for this–it’s the closest match I could think of. Please feel free to move it if it should be elsewhere.
At my work, I use a microscope on a regular basis. Because of the way it’s set up, it’s much easier to attach a microscope camera to it and use that, connected to a monitor, for most work. However, when I put the microscope camera on, it seems to be zoomed in, meaning I can only see a very small portion of the center of the image on the screen. The camera is zoomed out as far as it goes, but I still see even less than just the middle ninth of the image, compared to looking through the eyepiece.
Is this indicative of a problem with the setup, perhaps some adapter I should have that i don’t? Or just that buying a cheap microscope camera wasn’t the best idea? Or is this somehow just an intrinsic problem with using a microscope camera in general?
The microscope, if it’s relevant, is a Seiwa PS-888, and the microscope camera is a super cheap Omano TMS-HDMI-1.
I looked at the specs for the camera and microscope and I think you're running into a crop-sensor problem. The camera you're using has a 1/3" sensor, which means that if the image the microscope is projecting is 1" across at the camera's focal plane then you're only looking at the middle 1/7 of the image circle.
Of course, the eyepiece you're using affects the image you see vs what the camera sees. if your eyepiece had more magnification then it might be a perfect match for the camera setup you now have. The source I link to below has a table that shows, for a 10x eyepiece, that a 1/3" sensor needs a .3x reducer for the image to match what you see through the eyepiece.
Usually (when using an eyepiece adapter) you can get C-Mount adapters that have a reduction lens built in so that the small sensor size is better matched to the image size.
If the C-Mount adapter comes off of your 'scope and leaves an eyepiece sized tube you might be able to use one of these. A discussion of C-Mount reduction adapters (with useful links) can be found here.
Answered by BobT on July 13, 2021
Your microscope camera sports an imaging chip that is labeled 1/3 inch. This is a misleading nomenclature. It’s origin is the diameter of a glass vacuum tube used in TV cameras of the past. Your imaging chip’s measurements are approximately 3.5mm height by 4.66mm length.
Your 1/3 inch imaging chip is typical of low cost point-and-shoot still cameras.
For example, a high-end microscope camera sports a full frame imaging chip that measures 24mm height by 36mm length.
The best way to explain the difference is to compute the diagonal differenced thus: Your chip has a diagonal measure of 3.5mm. The full frame camera has a diagonal that measures 43.26mm.
The difference is: 43.26 ÷ 3.5 = 12.36. This value is called the crop factor or magnification factor. It tells us that your camera yields a tiny image that must be magnified 12 1/3 times to produce an image the same size as a full frame camera. Another way to state this: 1/12.36 X 100 = 8%. In other words, you camera's imaging chip is only 8% of the size of a full frame camera.
Answered by Alan Marcus on July 13, 2021
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