Hi all!, I'm thinking about buying a Motic BA210 LED Trinocular, its price is around 1200€.
I have read that the model is a bit old, in fact, there is a new BA210E, but its price is out of my budget, so I think I'll have to stay with the standard BA210 or look for another one
What do you think? Would be the BA210 a good purchase?
no phase contrast, no dic, no darkfield, no planapo objectives.
I don't know the brand, but i think you are better of buying a used one of the big names like zeiss, leitz, nikon, etc. you could get a used one for 300 to 500$. that would leave you 700$ to almost 1K$ to buy all the other things u need (upgrade some of your objectives, add other condensers, etc.)
or if you really don't want a second hand, you could find the same from the cheaper brands that you can find in ebay and get similar results.
Motic have carved out a modest niche for themselves primarily by undercutting non Chinese microscopes in price , mimicking their designs and spreading the gospel that some of the major makers get their lower priced instruments made in the same factory.
If they still don't, tire maker's like Pirelli , Dunlop or whoever also once made wheelbarrow tires in the same factory that they turned out radials. If they don't, it's because the Chinese are making them.
Chinese microscopes are perfectly adequate. They produced one of the most brilliantly designed lab quality field microscopes ever devised. However, their widely marketed student to lab grade microscopes are no better than a 30 year old microscope made well in scores of countries. We are all fortunate that we now live at the tail end of an era when about a dozen absolutely first rate microscope manufacturers with old world crafstmanship and brilliant engineering and optical designs were pulling out all the stops to stay in business under the onslaught of firstly cheap Japanese competition, then Chinese. Only a few have survived, due to either sheer size or regional appeal. There are thousands of first rate second hand microscopes out there from these makers, with features that are the envy of all but the best Chinese stuff( expensive best Chinese stuff, to get those features).
Since you are in the U.K., I would be looking around for a used Baker or Vickers microscope. They bit the bullet, simply because their mics were such high quality and got too expensive to make. They are in the Cooke optics family; famous for their super expensive apochromatic camera lenses. Older instruments would be labelled Cooke, C.T.S., then later Cooke-Baker, then Vickers. The optics are superb, as good as anybody's in the business. Even the achromats have unusually high N.A.'s, something that you never see on Chinese microscopes and rarely see on any others, as well .
I've seen Vickers Photoplan microscopes go for as little as 400.00 , used here in N.A., simply because no one knows anything about them.
There should be quite a few around in the U.K. and for much less than a new Chinese piece of plastic.
