What kind of desk lamp / magnifier do you use ?

[aneng]

Hi.

I need to get a bright desk lamp for working on PCBs and I'm wondering what is considered the best type to get for this kind of work ?

I see there are a lot of magnifier type lamps with ring lighting, but the magnification is usually only 5x, which I don't think is going to be enough for SMD work, though it might be OK for larger components / general use.

There are also the long LED strip kind.... which seem like they might be good.

I think that either way, I want to go with a swing-arm type ('anglepoise' type) rather than a gooseneck as I've had lots of gooseneck stuff go floppy on me in the past.

What do you use ?

Thanks !

[clearchris]

Re: What kind of desk lamp / magnifier do you use ?

I'm not well read on optics, but generally speaking, the higher the magnification, the closer you have to get to the work. I have a pair of 2.5 readers, which work ok. I also have an old desktop swing arm luxo magnifier, it's probably around 3.5-4x. It works decent, but it's hard to get my desoldering gun under there, so I usually have to swing it away. It's very heavy, so that works ok, make sure whatever you get can be secured very well, I personally look with skepticism on the clamp type ones, even though the desktop base takes up so much room.

For SMT work, I'd say it depends. SMT ranges from some decently large components to components that seem scarcely bigger than a spec of dust.

The advantage of the digital microscopes is that you can get the scope closer to the work without interfering with your working space as much.

The eevblog guy has some reviews of digital microscopes, they are definitely worth a watch. Unfortunately, it seems that they all come with hokey software to control the scope, which is a major strike in my opinion. I'm not sure there are any open source options that might be a bit more refined, but I haven't looked either.

If you get a digital scope, I'd probably make sure you have something for fume extraction, the scope gets so close that I'm sure it would be very easy to foul the lens...

[dicky96]

Re: What kind of desk lamp / magnifier do you use ?

@aneng
Are you sure most desk magnifiers (the ones with the flourescent or led ring light) are 5x magnification? In my experience all the anglepoise ones I see are either 5x diopter or 8x diopter

Diopter is not the same thing as magnification (otherwise it would just be called magnification yeah?). Magnification is diopter divided by 4 + 1 - any one can google that, it's easy to look it up!

So...
5x diopter = 5/4 = 1.25+1 = 2.25x magnification
8x diopter = 8/4 = 2 + 1 = 3x magnification

So firstly where are you finding these 5x magnification desk magnifiers? That would be 16x diopter ,and I haven't seen any that powerful


And secondly, to answer your question - my 3.5x - 45x trinocular microscope is normally set to 3.5x while I am soldering because that is usually more than enough (though sometimes I need to zoom in further, 5x - 6x maybe) But generally I would say an 8x Diopter would have roughly the same magnification of my microscope when zoomed out to minimum magnification, which is how I generally use it. The quality of optics and stereo vision is another matter though.

Rich

[eccerr0r]

Re: What kind of desk lamp / magnifier do you use ?

I have a spring-balanced arm lamp with magnifier, it's only like 2+ magnification. Seems if you want a larger work distance and high magnification, it necessarily needs more elements and more elements = more expensive.

These swing arm lamps that aren't weight balanced also are annoying after a while when the friction stops with the thumb bolt no longer hold. I have one where one of the thumb bolts stripped, and no longer holds. Fortunately the magnifier lamp still mostly holds.

Sometimes it's cheaper to get a microscope than a swing arm magnifier because at least the microscope lenses are... small!