+one billion points for ASS.

I love ASS, its one of the best stores in the US. If you have a chance to visit one I would highly recommend it. Their product labels are cheeky and adorable and they have all sorts of wonderful, random shit

Your post only makes sense if you click any of the GP's provided links. The GP's post only shows sciplus.com and Science Surplus. You have to actually view the site to see that it is American Science & Surplus for your post of "I love ASS" to make sense. In other corners of the interweb, that comment might get you different responses ;-)

Quite frankly, I'm not sure why the other poster left off an important part of the store's name. Its not "Science Surplus", as you state its "American Science and Surplus"

The full name leads to a wonderful acronym

I did only because of their domain name but I should have written it out in its entirety.

I personally think that a microscope without the knobs to move the table left/right and forwards/backwards shouldn't exist, or at least shouldn't be sold.

I can't imagine having to move the <thing that you're watching> with your own hands...

But then again, maybe I'm just spoiled, since I'm used to the microscopes that we have at the university aka. higher budget (>1000€).

Still to anyone looking to buy a microscope, I would very highly recommend that they get one with knobs to move the table.

Do you know of any good sellers that sell in Europe?

Here's an AmScope 40-1000x binocular compound scope with a 3-axis mechanical stage and LED illumination for a paltry $239.

https://amscope.com/collections/compound-microscopes/product...

130$ shipping to EU... :D

What would you recommend for someone who a) wants to see something as small as mushroom spores, and b) would like to take decent quality pictures of them? DSLR or smartphone mount if there's one that's not super fiddly?

I'm an astrophotography nut, but I can see where imaging with a telescope has similar issues/hurdles as imaging with a microscope. There are mounts that allow you to position a smartphone on the exit pupil of an eye piece of a telescope so that you get the benefits of the magnification of the eye piece. I can only imagine that there are similar for microscopes as well.

As for using a DSLR with the microscope, I'm guessing it might have similar issues as astronomy. When attaching the camera to the telescope (possibly same for microscope), you lose the magnification of the eye pieces. The image data is hitting the tiny tiny pixels of the DSLR so that the scale of things will be very small in your high megapixel image. This is why so many people prefer lower resolution cameras as the pixel sizes on the sensor are much larger. Just based on experience with optics, I'd imagine this would hold true to microscopes as well.

I use c-mount web cameras. Look for a scope with a trinocular head, and then get a c-mount adapter and a c-mount web cam (super-cheap on amazon).

DSLRs are nice, excellent image quality, but quite expensive and heavy for the job.