Digital Blue QX3+ Computer Microscope. Get children and adults to play the smart way with the QX3+ USB Computer Microscope. The QX3 + microscope  magnifies anything from 10x all the way to 200x. You can view everything from the pre-prepared slide of a honeybee leg to a close up of your own tongue.

Digital Blue recently acquired the entire Intel "Play Product" line. This microscope is from the new Digital Blue Microscope line. It is the same microscope and technology as the Intel and Mattel line.

Electrical power for the camera system and specimen illumination lamps is obtained from the computer through the Universal Serial Bus (USB) port. Information and control commands are also passed between the computer and the microscope using this pathway. The accompanying software package provides an interface that is very nicely done with excellent graphics and audio clips that are presented through a kid-friendly layout. Students are able to capture single images, make movies, and perform time-lapse investigations on a variety of specimens with a single click of the mouse.

Much More Than Just Slides
The most impressive thing about this microscope is the fact you can take it out of its slide-viewing cradle. As long as it's still plugged into the computer, you can magnify anything with it: the hairs on your arm, your eyeball, flowers, or even the hidden microscopic text on money. While it is harder to focus using the microscope in handheld mode, it allows children to interact with a moving and alive world, rather than the pre-prepared, dead, flat world of the traditional microscope.

Movies of the Microscopic
Another killer feature of the microscope is that it's not just a stills camera, it's a movie camera too. Carpet fly-overs, centipede's leg articulation or flies digesting their food can all be captured. You can even create a time-lapse movie. Photographing a sprouting seed over hours and then playing the images back as a movie is an amazing leap forward from the static view of a traditional microscope.

Image Capture and Editing
With the CD-ROM software included with QX3 Computer Microscope you can capture images and manipulate them with simplified, but still very useful paint tools and special effects (including fly-eye, kaleidoscope and atomic glow). If this pretty versatile array of image manipulating tools isn't enough you can even import or export your captured images to other programs.

Kids can share their creations by printing their projects as posters or stickers or by e-mailing images to friends. Children can also create their own slide presentations by sequencing and editing the captured images, video clips and time-lapse movies and adding music and sound effects.

Well Suited to the Very Young and Old Scientist
The unit itself appears robust, is brightly coloured and very simple to use...even parents will understand how it works. Time has been taken over the computer interface too. All captured images and movies are stored in one easily accessed collection window. Image manipulation is straightforward and very "undoable" if you make a mistake. Most kids should be able to enjoy the product as soon as it's installed and features like spoken word help will guide them through the more complicated functions.

• QX3+ Microscope (This is the newer "+" version)

• QX3 Microcope Software

• Instruction and Activity Guide

• Two containment dishes

• Two sample jars

• Three seperated slides

• Plastic tweezers

• Eye dropper

• Slide Clip

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