Blue Collar Scientist

My good fortune in getting a few small fossils in Arizona to use in my guest teaching brought to my attention the startling lack of magnifying optics that I own.

Well, that’s not entirely true - I have two astronomical telescopes, a spotting scope for birds and other Alaskan wildlife, and a good pair of binoculars. But all this requires the subject to be a considerable distance away, and when you want to look at some hadrosaur teeth up close, it just doesn’t work out¹. I realized that my first step in adding magnification to my arsenal should be a decent loupe.

I did a little internet research, and decided to make a slightly risky purchase - a Belomo 10x loupe from CR Scientific. The internet pundits - who I trust only a little, because I’m pretty sure I know more about optics than most of them - all spoke very highly of the loupe. So I decided if it didn’t work out, it was no big thing - I’d have a crappy loupe for harsh field use, and I’d go get a nice Nikon or Zeiss loupe at ten times the price for when I wanted to see something really well.

Well, the loupe arrived yesterday and I have to say my initial impressions are very positive. It is a small loupe, with the housing not much over an inch across. The eye lens is 19mm in diameter. It is held in a folding metal enclosure done up with a nice pebbly finish - not the best enclosure I’ve seen (it doesn’t lock, for example, and it isn’t dustproof), but it is hardly bad. The instruction sheet is in the Cyrillic alphabet, and I have no idea what it says.

The optics work for me. The field is flat, so you can focus everything at once; there is no noticeable chromatic aberration anywhere in the field; and the images are sharp and contrasty. The optics are knocking my socks off, actually - they’ve dispelled any kind of reservation I might have had about the enclosure. The two subjects that I consider acid tests for a hand-held magnifier - bird feathers viewed in backlighting, and rocks with shiny specks viewed in sunlight - look real good in this loupe. And I’ve been looking at everything - the seed pods the cottonwoods are dropping around here, little rocks, my MacBook screen, an old scar from a shrapnel wound on my leg…. The fun goes on and on. New toy!

Oh, by the way, the really dominant reason to get one of these is this: it costs $21.95. I seriously doubt anything can beat the price/performance ratio that this modest unit offers, unless perhaps you are looking for something that is resilient . And the company isn’t stupid about shipping it to Alaska - they simply threw it in the mail, and it arrived in great shape. So, if you need a loupe, and you don’t want to spend a bundle….

1. I came home from the trip wanting a stereo microscope, but that’s mainly to support some teaching activities that I’m expanding into at the beginning of the upcoming school year, and I’m not sure I want to drop money into that just yet. [↩]