Vividia PM-70 USB 2MP Handheld Digital Borescope Microscope

Well, I purchased my endoscope in August of 2011 and after about a year and a half it did the same thing some others have experienced. The retaining ring that keeps the focus adjuster on came off. No big deal at first. I just pushed it back on and it would stay on for a few weeks or months at a time and then started coming off every time I used it until finally a few days ago the cable, circuit board and camera lens came out of the barrel completely. I carefully reinserted everything and it seemed to work fine until it came apart the second time and after that it wouldn’t focus correctly and wouldn’t take snapshots. Went to try to use it the next day to inspect a another pcb and it wouldn’t work at all. The led’s worked but I have no image at all now. A big disappointment considering I paid over $100 for it and now have no inspection camera of which I need several times a week. I’ve had to use my Canon T3i with the macro lens on it just to get by lately, but that’s kind of a pain to use for electronics inspection and repair. Hate to invest in another one and chance it happening again yet it‘s become a necessary tool. Guess I’ll consider a different design and manufacturer this time. Must change my rating on this one from 5 to 2.

I received the endoscope/microscope yesterday. Below is my review after one day of use. Shipping: Let me start with the shipping. Perfect. They used a box with packing material around the product box itself. When you open the product box it is like opening a piece of fine jewelery. The scope is seated in a velvet like cutout and presented as if it were an expensive watch or diamond ring. The other components are individually sealed and located in the compartment below the scope. I only mention the shipping and packaging because it was just so impressive as to be noteworthy. You will not throw out the box for this scope. It is that nice. The scope: Exactly what I needed to examine and take pictures of coins. I metal detect and it is sometimes very hard to see the dates of very old coins. No problem now. This thing can zoom in so far I can make the date alone as big as my laptop screen. It can also zoom out so that I can see the entire coin when needed too. I've read other product reviews that state that their microscope can only zoom at 20x or 200x for example but nothing in between. I don't know if that is true because I don't have another scope, but I can say without a doubt that this one will zoom in to the max advertised magnification and can zoom out to infinity if you want to use it like a web cam or video camera. At the opposite end of the scope is a fine tuning barrel screw. It is serrated for easy gripping and allows you to fine focus on your object once you have moved the scope as close as you want. The USB cable has an inline adjustment knob for the 6 tiny LEDs in the end of the scope. It is very nice to be able to light up your target. Included in the kit are several inspection attachments that can be put on the end of the scope. One of them allows you to look sideways. This is good for inspecting the inside of pipes or other small enclosures. The USB cable is heavy duty and is about 6 feet long for working further away from the computer when needed. I use mine right next to my laptop. I can manipulate the scope controls with my left hand and snap pictures with my right. Very easy. The stand: Excellent design. All metal like a surgical instrument. It can be adjusted in all directions. The scope can be moved up or down within the arm and is held in place with a set screw at the end. Once the scope is attached to the arm, you can move then entire arm up or down with the big barrel screw at the back of the platform. Very easy and smooth movement. The entire arm swivels left and right if needed but I just leave it centered over the platform. The end of the arm with the scope can also rotate if you need to point the scope up like a web cam. The bottom of the platform has 4 rubber feet and sets level on any smooth surface. The software: I use a laptop with Windows 7. The software works great. It's just one executable file you can copy to your desktop. It allows to you view whatever is under the scope. You can snap pictures or take videos via the software too. Once you have zoomed in on your object just click the mouse on the "snap" menu option or just hit your "enter" key. Either way takes a picture and puts the file on your desktop. You can also set a default location for the software if you want the pictures or videos to be saved to an alternate location. The CD also has a user manual in PDF format and a link to the Microsoft site if you need to upgrade the drivers for your computer. Conclusion: For me this was the perfect solution to my problem. I wanted something that was easy to use, allowed me to magnify my coins and other finds, and allowed me to take micro pictures. High quality was also important as I did not want to have to buy something twice. I am very pleased with this purchase from every aspect. If you're going to drop 100 bucks on a tool then you want to get something that looks, feels, and works like a 100 dollar tool. I can't review the longevity of the product but it looks like money well spent so far.

Use this to inspect small fiber optic pieces on the manufacturing floor. Very easy to use and the stand and accessories come in handy. Our more expensive inspection scopes are very difficult to use when inspecting ends of fiber optic assemblies. I love the adjustable light, can adjust from full ON to OFF. Taking pictures is very easy with the inline button. I would have given this 5 stars, but my first unit broke after ~ 5 uses. The manufacturer provided excellent service and promptly provided a replacement unit.

I have worked with several video cameras/microscopes and only one brand arrived with Mac OS X support out of the box. But with the other video microscopes, I was able to make each work with third party software. No true for this one. This "camera" does not appear to register as a standard USB video device. It appears that the LED lights can only be controlled with the in-line switch. I think that means that even using the Windows application, you can not control the light from the software app.

If you plan on using this scope a lot, and right away, you'll probably get your money's worth out of it. If you plan on using it just occasionally, you may find that it breaks just from the time it spends sitting in the box. That's what happened to me after less than an hour of total use. It looks like they use a type of glue that deteriorates with time. It flakes off so the focus knob doesn't work anymore. I can still adjust the focus by pulling and pushing the cable into and out of the barrel, so the scope didn't break completely. It's just really difficult to focus now - especially at higher magnifications. Also, the displayed images have a few large dark spots on them. That's probably from flecks of glue which flaked off and fell to the bottom of the tube.

UPDATE 2: Someone from Oasis Scientific contacted me based on my review update and offered to replace the broken endoscope or exchange for a model with a flexible arm more appropriate for inspection work. I've changed my review to 3 stars for now and will update with results based on what I decide to do. It is nice to see a company willing to honor their 1-year warranty instead of claiming everything is not covered by the warranty due to whatever excuse they care to make. UPDATE: I've owned this for about nine months and used it for about 60 minutes total and it's now broken. I was using it for maybe the forth time and had duct taped it to a straight coat hanger wire and was finding it useful to push into walls while I was running new wire in the walls, but every time I did it kept slowly losing focus. Whenever I pulled the camera out I would twist on the focus ring at the end and found it harder and harder to get it to focus on "infinity" so I could see things in the distance. By twisting the focus all the way in and then all the way out, I got it to almost focus, but that stopped working after awhile and things were hopelessly out of focus. I realized if I pushed the USB cable into the body of the camera the focus changed! Something was apparently loose inside. Since I could not get distant objects in focus so I thought maybe it was worth taking apart to try to fix it. I had noticed the end of the focus ring was loose so I pulled that and the whole focus ring slipped out of the camera body easily. I kept pulling and tiny brown wires appeared, eventually followed by a tiny circuit board. At that point I realized the wires must be leading to the LED lights and they were so tiny I figured they would surely break if I kept pulling, so I pushed it all back in again. I hoped I could somehow push it in far enough to repair the focus but the focus ring is securely attached to the usb cable so I can't push it in any farther than pushing the focus ring fully back into the camera body. Doing so leaves the camera far enough back that all I see is blur, even on close items when the focus ring is turned, so the camera is now useless. Maybe if I spend some time I can figure out how to shift or remove the focus ring from the USB cable so I can get the camera in further but I'm dubious. I always kept the endoscope in its original box which has padding so I can't imagine the focus problem was due to it getting knocked around. As far as I can tell, the focus in the camera is actually achieved by the focus ring literally pushing the USB cable in and out of the camera body which pushes the circuit board with the camera closer or farther from the lens which is permanently glued in the front of the camera. The focus ring has stops at both ends so it probably contains a little cylinder inside that clamps on the USB cable and the focus ring fits screw threads on the outside of the cylinder so it moves the cylinder back and forth as you screw the focus ring. But if the flexible USB cable bends a bit or the clamps shift on the USB cable, then your focus changes and you can't reach infinite focus anymore (which I assume is the camera pushed as close as possible to the lens). Obviously the USB cable is not stiff enough to reliably push the camera close to the lens or pushing the whole thing back together would have gotten me at least close to infinite focus again, but it's obvious the camera is now sitting too far back from the lens to focus on anything. They should have placed a stiff metal cylinder between the circuit board and the focus ring and used the cylinder to push the camera in and out instead of using the weak USB cable to do so. The current design is very imprecise and fragile and I wouldn't trust it to last in any camera. If you only use the camera for close-up work, you might not notice or care if infinite focus fails, but if you need infinite focus, do not buy this camera. ORIGINAL REVIEW: This endoscope looks very cool and takes very nice pictures. Mine seems slightly defective in that one of the six LEDs does not light up until you turn them all to full brightness, and then it stays on until you dim it too far. Its main faults are the accessories and lack of USB 1.0 support. The product description says "PC Interface: USB 2.0" which did not imply to me that it is usable with USB 2.0 ONLY. I've never used any other USB 2.0 peripheral that wasn't backwards compatible with a USB 1.x port, but I could not get the included software to show me a picture on a WinXP laptop that had only a USB 1.x port. I also tried YawCam and could not get a picture. Its error was along the lines of "Failed to connect to camera". However, WinXP's device manager did list the camera as a "USB 2.0 Camera", so it was being recognized on some level. I also tried MS Video and Movie Maker and it claimed the camera was busy and in use by another application. I couldn't find any other application that could have been using the camera. I plugged it in to a much newer Win7 desktop machine and it worked with YawCam with no issue. When set to 1600x1200 resolution, the screen update was REALLY slow. The video on my screen lagged like 10 seconds behind how I moved the camera and I think it was getting farther and farther behind. However, when I tried the software included with the camera, the video didn't slow down at high resolution. Yet when I unchecked the "high resolution" checkbox, video slowed down again. I checked it and unchecked it a few times and video did NOT slow down again on either setting. Having "high resolution" checked doesn't seem to change the resolution at all. My monitor is set to 1600x1200 and at full screen, I could not see any difference. I tried taking a snapshot by using the menu and by pressing Enter, but nothing happened. Then I tried the white button on the camera, and that took a picture (but in a huge uncompressed bmp format, and it took at least 10 seconds before it let me take another picture). The video capture option worked fine. Reading the manual on the CD, I got the impression that "High Resolution" actually has nothing to do with setting the resolution, but it actually controls whether you can take a picture with the keyboard vs the button on the camera. I experimented, and indeed that seems to be the case. With Options > "High Resolution" unchecked, I can take snapshots with keyboard enter or with the Snap > Capture menu, but not with the button on the camera. It's pretty weird they took the time to document this bizarre behavior instead of just changing the checkbox from "High Resolution" to "Snap with Camera Button" or something. I wonder if they don't have anyone who knows how to modify their software on staff anymore... Returning to yawcam, I didn't get the slow video problem there, either, so it seems to be a random thing. However, I did notice that with yawcam the "scan rate" seemed to be slower so I would see the top and bottom of the screen moving at different rates, which looks very strange on video. The instruction manual is pretty simplistic and filled with poorly translated English. Here's my favorite line: "Rap the F5 key to arouse a timing snap." I don't think I WANT an aroused timing snap... Although another reviewer said this camera doesn't work on OSX, I tried it anyway with the included "Photo Booth" app and it came up with video immediately. Unfortunately the image is flipped left to right, like looking in a mirror, which makes the camera hard to use. Also, I couldn't find any option to increase the resolution above what it defaulted to (I think 640x480). I later found a hack to make Photo Booth 2.0 from Leopard mirror the video and another hack to blow up the image so it almost fills the screen, though it's still stuck at 640x480 resolution so it looks pixelated. You can also just zoom the screen in by holding cmd and moving two fingers upward on the trackpad (or right click). If you use Photo Boot 2.0 hacked you need to start it, then plug in the endoscope so it uses the scope instead of the internal camera. OSX "Image Capture" does not work. I later found it also works with iChat without an actual chat going on. Just select Video > Video Preview and you can drag the preview window to almost as large as the screen and take snapshots. The preview seems to use the camera's full 1600x1200 resolution. Unfortunately it has the same mirrored image problem as Photo Booth and the "Record Chat" option is greyed out so I don't know how you can record video. My main motivation in buying this camera was to look in cracks and under our deck to try to figure out where mice are getting into our walls. I figured the 90-degree mirror attachment would actually be better for this kind of thing than the traditional bendable scope camera since those cameras don't bend at very sharp angles. The problem is that with the LEDs turned up past a third, the glare on the mirror makes the image hazy and hard to see. In fact, 3-4 inches seems to be the maximum distance the amount of light lets you make anything out. I think the problem is that when the camera is zoomed all the way out to see things at a distance, you see a lot of the edge of the hole and the LEDs reflect off that edge, creating a very bright spot that forces the camera to compensate and make the whole image too light/washed out. If I could cut the hole larger or change the mirror angle a bit so I could push the camera in deeper, I think you might not see the edge of the hole and have that problem. The mirror also seems to attract dust particles like crazy and I kept wiping it, but it didn't help the haze much. I eventually found I could see a lot farther with a lot more clarity by shining a standard LED light in from behind the camera and turning off the camera's LEDs, but it can be quite hard to get an external light to penetrate to the right areas. When I got it back inside I realized I'd somehow scratched the mirror by wiping it with my clothing. I tried to clean the scratches away with a kleenex and ended up leaving more scratches. So the mirror gets dirty way too easily and is way too easy to scratch which makes it rather useless for inspection work in the long term. The scratches aren't really visible as scratches through the camera, but they add to the haze effect that makes things hard to see. I eventually tried to remove the mirror and change its angle but whatever solvent I used to unstick it (acetone, I think) destroyed the mirror. It's just poor-quality plastic with a thin, reflective backing and my solvent made the whole thing cloudy. I wanted to replace it with something higher quality but I haven't been able to find any glass mirrors of the correct shape and size. I also don't have the tools/skills to break a glass mirror to that shape. I tried using reflective mylar plastic but it makes the camera image blurry, I guess because it isn't reflective enough. The LEDs seem blindingly bright when looked at directly, but even without the 90 degree mirror they don't cast enough light to see more than 1-3 feet. You can see farther (about 3 feet) in narrow areas like inside a wall where the light bounces around the small space, but in more open spaces, don't expect to see more than a foot. This, again, makes the scope less useful for inspection work, especially since you can't push the scope in too deeply. As a magnifying scope this is a very nice solution. I also figured we'd use this camera to take closeup images of bugs or plants or whatever, and I think it will work quite well for that. The ability to focus works well and the magnification is quite high.

I've purchased about five USB microscopes, and this is the best one yet. The base and holder is steady enough that you can adjust the focus without wiggling the microscope too much. It has both a software trigger and a button on the cord for snapping pictures, so you don't wiggle it during a picture. The software looks better, haven't explored it yet. It's very slender, and comes with a sturdy tube mount with a 45 degree mirror. There is an LED brightness control, which is absolutely necessary because oblique lighting is needed for many subjects. Some other microscopes have higher magnification, but if you adjust the focus knob a bit too far, then nothing comes into focus and you have to hunt for the knob setting that still allows sharp focus. On this microscope, the focus knob is limited from travelling outside of a usable range.

The images from the camera look great. The build quality of the camera & stand looks quite solid. Having said that, the software (on CD) that came with it leaves much to be desired. The initial installation generated a couple of dialog boxes in (what I assume to be) Chinese language (I am, in fact, in the USA). No clue what they referred to, but still asking (I assume) for a YES/NO response. Fortunately, a link in one of the included .pdf help files connected me to a microsoft site, to download a correct(?) driver file, which seemed to eliminate that issue upon re-install. The main application (ehe.exe), upon loading, generated a couple of error dialogs with very cryptic error descriptions, as follows: "! 312Couldn't render the video capture stream. hr=0x80070057 The capture device may already be in use by another application. The sample will now close." and... "! 17 Couldn't run the graph!" Even so, the program loads, but for some reason, defaults to the webcam on my laptop instead of the microscope. Menu options in the program allow me to 'select' which camera to use, so I selected the correct 'usb 2.0 camera' instead. The only way I found, to keep the program from defaulting to my webcam, was to DISABLE the webcam through the Control Panel. Another issue, a menu option called 'High Resolution' is checked by default. In order to enable the software to snap a picture (via the program itself), the 'High Resolution' must be un-checked, which then sets the resolution at 640 x 480 pixels (not the 1600 x 1200 as advertised). You can leave the 'High Resolution' option checked (which does resolve at 1600 x 1200), but then you MUST use the mechanical switch on the USB cable to 'snap' the picture. I visited the Oasis Scientific website, to see if an updated version of the software was available. There is a link to download an un-named usb camera application. Turns out, it's exactly the same program, exactly as buggy. They also offer a link to another application (called yawcam), which is advertised as 'having more features' than their standard program. Edit on 14-JUL-2011: I previously stated the yawcam application wouldn't resolve anything beyond 640 x 480 pixels. That was stated in error. I've since found an option to change that in the program. It will resolve up to 1600 x 1200 (which is curiously labelled as 'default', but the app itself defaults to 640 x 480, when first loaded). The 'Output Size' can be changed through the 'Settings/Device (USB2.0 Camera)/Format control' menu tree in the program. Varying the Output size will also vary the 'Frame Rate', which affects how slow/fast the displayed image will change, when lighting/focus/zoom adjustments are made at the camera. Higher output resolution will slow it down considerably. I've found it simpler to make all positioning/lighting/focus/zoom adjustments at lower resolution, and then change the output to higher resolution when you're ready to snap a pic. The output file format is selectable in yawcam as JPG, GIF or PNG format. In a nutshell, it IS possible to take & save some impressive images with this camera. But doing so is a frustrating and awkward experience, thanks entirely to the included standard 'EHE.EXE' application. By the way, in Googling for some info on the 'EHE.EXE' application, I'm seeing many references to a same-named virus/malware program out there. That doesn't inspire confidence either, in searching for an update to this program. I'm beginning to think the optional 'Yawcam' application is the better option for this scope. There may still be other options available, but at least I think I can live with this one for now. (Edit on 15-JUL-2011: I'm also finding that the HP MediaSmart webcam application on my notebook is working with this scope. That's two alternate apps I've found that work with it, and the one app that is shipped with the product hasn't worked as well. Seems a bit odd. ) By the way, I'm running Windows 7 (64-bit), on a brand new HP DV7 notebook.