I used this microscope to inspect soldering on student assembled projects and to look for shorts on flight controller boards for quadcopters. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it did the job. First, having battery power is great because you can use it anywhere. Being able to take pictures and record video is very useful, and some samples are included. The highest magnification is only possible if you remove the light diffuser that's on the end of the lens assembly. At that magnification, you can see the smallest details of printed circuit boards, and spot shorts between surface mounted components. Zoomed out a bit is useful for identifying chips on a board. The included light is sometimes overwhelming, and creates unhelpful reflections. In that case, it's better to shine in another light from the side. The sensor uses autobrightness to set the picture brightness level. This sometimes washes out super bright parts of the image because the rest is darker. An improvement would be to let the user set the image brightness level to tone things down to see the bright parts. Connecting the camera to a laptop is a great way to see a huge version of the picture, and makes it great to do work live under the scope. You just need to raise the lens high enough to work under it, which reduces the magnification a bit. Overall, a good value for the functionality you get.