Review: Smart Phone Microscope

I have not been given this nor am I being paid for this review; I am purely writing this after being blown away by the benefits of such a simple and low cost magnifier.

Rachel has always enjoyed using her microscope but it's not exactly easy to carry around and has no flexibility for viewing anything bulky.  I saw smart phone microscopes advertised online and thought they might be fun and useful; and at less than £10 I bought one for Rachel for Christmas.  She opened the microscope on boxing day, put it on her phone and bingo!  She was off looking at the detail of the carpet, her clothes, random food, dust, leaves and more.

About an hour later I managed to get a go and was amazed to find that I could read words on a newspaper using it.  This might not sound that special, but when you're vision is as poor as mine (I'm severely sight impaired - blind - and can't read text below 20 font and even that can be a strain) it's a huge cause of excitement.

I spent the next few days trying out all sorts of text on different types of paper and found the microscope unbelievably easy to use; in fact it was just as good as the Rehan Looky 4 which I had spent £400 on to help me read.  It is small and light, simple to use - you just put it on the phone and switch on the camera - and because of it's low cost you don't have to be anxious about using it.

Don't get me wrong, the looky 4 is far and away a better magnifier and has lots of useful tools including reverse colour and blue and yellow; I wouldn't be without it for reading letters. But for less than 3% of the cost of the Looky this smartphone microscope is amazing and can fit in my small bag for checking small print on packets when I'm out and about.  It even uses the phone light (camera flash) so works in dark places.  In these photos you can see the small print on my eye drops really well magnified.

And if you're more like Rachel and love looking at clothing under the microscope, here you go