Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsGood, but fragile. *SELLER KEEPS SPAMMING OFFERS TO PAY TO REMOVE NEGATIVE REVIEWS*
Reviewed in Canada on September 3, 2021
Update 2: another star off for nonstop spamming of my email with bribe offers. This is against Amazon's Terms of Service, and just extremely dishonest and annoying in general.
Update: knocked off one star because the seller tried to bribe me to take down my review. Spend that money fixing the design instead of gaming the review system!
Great picture quality for the price, and I was pleasantly surprised at the magnification.
However, one major issue: don't let your child drop it or otherwise shock load it. Allow me to channel my man AvE for a bit: the focus ring is threaded on the inside, and the lens assembly rides on those threads with two tiny plastic nubs. I'm assuming ours got dropped (I don't know for sure, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and hope it's not so flimsy that it would break by itself!), because the focus ring ended up spinning freely with no focus to be had.
Like most Chinese products, it's definitely not designed for serviceability in mind; the upper clamshell is glued into the lower case. After I finally pried it open (and ripped the power connector off the board in the process, nothing a bit of solder can't fix), I managed to strip it down to diagnose the issue. The problem is, the lens cone is captive inside the lower case, and you're not going to separate that case because it's glued tight. So there's no way to glue the lens cone's focus nubs back in place. It's an extremely fragile and stupid design; just a little bit more plastic and it would be able to handle anything. So at best, you can manually position the focus cone and do all of your focusing by moving the microscope up and down. Sucks, because it's such an easy fix in the design stage.
Still, with this caveat in mind, I'd still recommend it because the price can't be beat for what you get.