Almost exactly 3 years ago, Slashdot got the geek masses to go out and buy the Intel QX3 video microscope, which was a failure on the toy market, but saw some success with geeks right as intel cancelled the line.

Well, as some of you know, I recently bought a new desktop system at home, and I decided to pull my QX3 out of mothballs, and give it a whirl again. The old drivers on the CD don’t work on XP, but before Intel stopped supporting the QX3, they released new drivers. The XP install comes with the software, which IMHO is kind of wonky, as well as TWAIN drivers. (Note: in XP sp2, Microsoft started to abandon TWAIN in favor of it’s new WIA architecture for imaging devices – as a result, the QX3 will not show up in your control panel as an imaging device, nor with it show up in software that only uses WIA, like Paint.NET. (Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop or the free Irfanview all do work though).

In digging around looking for information on my QX3, I discovered something. As far as I can tell, in November 2004, Prime Entertainment purchased the intel play line, and has been selling under the company name Digital Blue. Well, in December they released an upgrade to this great piece of equipment: the Digital Blue QX5 Digital Microscope. New Features include moving to an ultrabright LED for lighting, a 640 x 480 camera, faster video (15 frames/second), and a few other features. It’s running about $80 – $90 online.


Misc QX5 & QX3 links: