20MP USB3.0 BSI C-Mount Microscope Camera with Calibration Slide

IF YOU HAVE A LOW FRAMERATE ITS YOUR EXPOSURE TIME. If you leave autoexposure on it will select 300ms exposure by default, which locks you to a max of 3fps. Excellent camera, and while it’s not rated for it, I’ve gotten long exposures with moderate quality into the NIR and UVB bands. Noisy at 5000% gain, 2000ms exposure, but impressive nonetheless. Also, worth noting, does not report sensor temperature but it does allow for hardware gain, frame cropping, and even the ability to change bit depths up to 16 bits. Also of note is the RAW footage is vertically inverted from the non RAW image. 30 fps up until max resolution, which limits to 15 fps.

I picked up this camera on Amazon for my metallurgical scope. I only purchased it from Amazon/Amscope because of the tariff turmoil. The good: it takes really good photos and has good low-noise dark performance. It 'just works' with the AmScope software when you plug it in. The bad: I'm not sure why, but the framerate (even at lowered resolution) is very slow. You need an insane amount of light to get a reasonable framerate even though the sensor is supposed to be 'sensitive' at 2.4um pixels. This slow framerate makes the image stitching functions useless and makes you a little seasick when panning around. The problem gets even worse if you use a filter, diffuser, etc... I have another camera with an IMX678 sensor and though it has lower resolution (8.3MP) and smaller pixels size (2um), it maintains a much better frame rate and seems to be more practical. At higher magnifications, high pixel count is rather useless because the resolution is dominated by the optics. Last, but not least, these AmScope cameras are heavily marked up. The same cameras/sensors are available from other sources for under $500. Even with the current tariffs/delivery fees rolled in, this camera can be found much cheaper.

not very sharp image