I have a cheap binocular microscope at home, and solder most everything underneath it. A USB microscope is much lower resolution, and the image lags. They're pretty terrible.
At work I get to use a very very expensive Olympus binocular microscope. It is extraordinarily good, but at about 60k it costs more than a car.
My digital microscope has no lag and brilliant resolution. You can easily solder under it just looking at the screen. Just don't get the super cheap ones but one for maybe 150€ or so.
Yeah you can get an old Bauch&Lomb for under $200. Probably need an LED illuminator ring for $10 too.
They have great field of view (cm) at decent/variable magnification (20-100x) and response time is instant, whereas your phone/USB are going to have just enough delay to be annoying.
I usually use my phone zoomed in + flashlight in video recording, and an external macro lens. It probably isn't as good as a usb microscope, but it works really, really well.
Looking at videos of people using microscopes, the quality seems to be on-par or worse than my phone.
I have a USB microscope and I'd say my phone on 5x soft-zoom is a pretty similar experience. The main thing is having enough screen size you can see, and a stable platform.
Plus USB scope things are like $80 on AliExpress and work fine.
I have 2 vision engineering Mantis and I have yet to see a video system that can rival it to work under it, no lag, “real” 3D vision (you can move your head to see behind magnified objects). The only things I miss sometimes is more magnification and a camera port to take pictures/ videos. As per soldering iron I could write a book, I had Hakko, Pace, Metcal, Weller, Ersa and to me the best experience is with JBC although the tips might not last if you’re not careful.
As much as I'd love to try your suggestions, they're very expensive even in that space.
From what I can see, the Mantis microscopes are in the $3500+ range and the JBC stuff is similarly expensive.
Most hobbyists would cringe at the price of buying a Thermaltronics soldering iron and that's like 5x cheaper. However, I can at least conclusively demonstrate the vast difference between something like that and a Hakko right in front of a person.
This stuff is like the difference between a $100 guitar, a $500 guitar, and a $2000 guitar. The difference between the $100 and the $500 one is obvious to almost everybody. The differences between the $500 and $2000 one won't be obviously noticeable until you get a lot of experience.
Absolutely, don’t get me wrong, all the other brands are fine tools, and nowadays even aliexpress soldering stations work wonders even for professional use, years ago only metcal and JBC had the “instant heat” technology, same for the microscope 4k 120fps cameras are trivial now but not so long ago they where unaffordable for the common person and optical stereo inspection micoscopes were a bit more affordable but the working distance and as commented here they are uncomfortable for longer use, the mantis was a revolution in that too.
My mother was recently cataloging some very small pots from an archaeological dig. I sent her with my nice camera, a prime lens, some macro adapters, and an adapter that would let her mount the body to the eyepiece of a microscope. The detail she was able to capture with the prime and macro adapters so vastly exceeded the capabilities of the university microscope that she decided to just use the camera, which had the additional advantage of having focus stacking to compensate for the shallow depth of field.
I would expect that this setup would work pretty well for a bench microscope setup if the camera can output video and isn't too big to mount on a tabletop tripod. Rather a lot can be done with crop zoom if you can get the focal length and lighting right.
I've used only lead-free solder for a decade. Get the good stuff with some silver in it and it's not difficult.