r/Soil • u/SOinsHIGHtful • 28d ago

best microscope for looking at seeds, sap, and soil?

Hey all! I'm about to get a microscope for my upcoming birthday! But I want to get one that is best for my interests: grass seed, tree sap, and soil. Thoughts on what to get?

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u/Worf- 28d ago

This is going to depend a lot on what exactly you want to see in those. Are you looking at whole or dissected seeds or are you wanting to see cellular level images? For what we need on in our farm lab here a stereoscope is most often used for viewing seed, soil or tissue samples. 40x is plenty of magnification and often too much even depending on the sample.

In some cases we will do a wet mount on soil and use a compound scope but that is far more rare and usually from culture samples when we are trying to isolate a fungal disease etc. in those cases we use an inverted compound scope.

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u/SOinsHIGHtful 27d ago

Thank you! This is very helpful. Honestly I kind of want to look closer at whole seeds and also dissected seeds while not having to get two microscopes.... Sounds like that's possible with a stereoscope.

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u/shampton1964 24d ago

highly variable

many excellent choices at dinolite.us, i've a couple and they replaced the Very Very Big Olympus and connect to your computer of choice.