Saturday, December 7, 2013

Smart phone microscope

Nowadays, everyone of us has a smart phone which has a high resolution camera!!!! . Using my smart phone Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini which has a 5 MP camera, and a concentrating lens of a Chinese (made in China) red laser pointer which does not cost more than 2 Egyptian pounds; I got a microscope with 100x magnification (calibrated on a ruler and measured using Microsoft office Visio 2007).

The flash light helps for the non-transparent samples. Which is really nice with this phone that the flash light is so close to the camera and this is helpful because the new lens array has a focal distance of around 1 cm where it is difficult to apply any light source within this distance between the cell phone and the sample. 

One of the drawbacks of this method is that the image captured tends to have a spherical distortion. Also, due to the flash light position; one side of the image (near to the flash) will have more light than the other side.

The idea is very interesting and turns your cell phone to portable microscope. You will discover a lot of things you didn't see before (invisible worlds)!!!! 

This is a sample of foam film used in the packing of an old Gigabyte motherboard.




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