Does anyone use a USB microscope for soldering? I'm contracting right now, and the place I am working only has one regular microscope (a nice one, vision engineering) that is always in use. I'm used to soldering under a microscope, and I was wondering if some of the cheap USB ones would work. I could just throw it in the laptop bag to take to work.

A lot of them have lots of magnification, and I only need about 10x or so. I'm worried that the microscope won't have enough room to work under.

I bought a USB microscope for this exact reason, but it's useless for this as there's not enough room under it to be able to work under it when it's focused. I'm not home right now so I can't measure, but I think it was something like 10-20mm space between the scope and the desktop. This was one of the 200x microscopes that you can find all over the place. I bought mine from Dealextreme.

Stig

I can't speak to how well any of them work for your purposes (or at all, for that matter), but have you checked Amazon? You didn't give any idea of what you define as "cheap," but there definitely appear to be plenty that address the problem of having enough room under the scope.

Do you use a stereo microscope? If so then you probably won't like any computer connected one...

I have used stereo microscopes, but it won't bother me to use the computer screen. Some of the posts on Amazon say they focus from 12 inches away at 20x, maybe that will work.

Wouldn't it make it hard to use with it not being stereo? I.e unable to judge position?

We've got one of these at work, it's clever stuff:

http://www.visioneng.com/elite_overview.php