Optically it’s pretty good (but I’ve been putting of an eye-test for a while, so the slight distortion on the edges might be me) and the magnification is upgradable (no idea on price but it ships with 3 dipoters and can be increased to 15 which sounds like lots). It throws out heaps of light and is built like a tank.

The lens also acts as a partial fume shield if your iron doesn’t extract. This is a long winded way of saying to anyone else reading this, if you find one of these going cheap, it gets a big thumbs up from me.

If only they did an upgrade that made my soldering look good at these magnifications, I’d be happy

I had a quick look and came up empty (well excluding filters designed for attaching directly to a camera), but back in 2001 we had a photographer come to the house to take pictures for submission to an architectural prize. He used a film, medium format body (digital was barely invented) and the fluro tubes in the kitchen were clad in, IIRC, orange film (probably an what’s termed an Orange 85 filter in the camera world) to correct the colour cast.

So it’s definitely available – or was back then.

The nice thing about the 0.5x lens I just added is that it will protect the objective lenses inside the scope from fumes and is much easier to clean. An alcohol soaked Kimwipe usually does the trick, although I doubt that is the “correct” way to do it. It is also possible to get 0x secondary objectives that perform the same protective function without changing the magnification. I have seen these in use in labs I have worked in. Usually they also function as a place to mount a ring light on scopes like mine that don’t come with a good place to clamp a light.

I have used halogen fiber optic ring lights before and have been pretty happy with them. They put out a truly staggering amount of light and keep the heat away from the work area. Unfortunately, they tend to be very expensive compared to fluorescent or LED ring lights.

I never liked the ring light, nor the LED ring lights we built up. My favorite, albeit a bit hot after a period of time was a dual head halogen lamp from Sunnex.

Most of my experience with SMT has been with a stereo zoom microscope (usually Nikon or B&L SZ series). I’ve never really had a problem using a traditional style stereo microscope, although admittedly I do not wear glasses while soldering. I can definitely see that glasses would make things more difficult.

Color temperature cannot be “poor”, since it’s just the tint of the light. Candles are about 1500K, incandescents are 2500K, general purpose “warm white” florescents are 3000K, and the sun is 5000K. The most efficient color temperature is 5000K, since that matches the frequency response of the eye, but it isn’t quite as big of a deal as the color rendering index.

Color rendering index measures how well the light renders color, as you may have guessed, and the lower it is, the more efficient. Monochromatic light has a CRI of 0, rendering color in shades of gray, while a really cheap florescent bulb will have a CRI of 6, with more expensive bulbs making a CRI of 7 or 8. An incandescent has a perfect CRI of 10, and a correspondingly lousy luminous efficiency.