Lamp With Magnifier

[dmcmullen]

Can anyone give advice on a good lamp that lights up with a strong magnifier?

 

 

 

thx

[Geo]

My advice would be to get a good quality LED lamp, and use it in conjunction with loupes and the likes of an Optivisor head band magnifier. Have a read of this :- http://www.watchrepairtalk.com/topic/1637-led-workbench-light-assessment/?hl=lamp

[Ishima]

Got to agree with Geo, though I hate telling others how to work, we all develop our own preferences and techniques. 

There's more than one reason I'd advise against a magnifying lamp based on my limited experience using them:
it can Interfere with hand eye co ordination. I think it has something to do with the distance between your eye, the lens, and the thing you're focusing on, and if these things aren't a certain way, your brain gets confused by the information. 

The optics of the lens don't tend to be stellar, either, this isn't something i'm a particular expert on either, but I'm using big words here because photography is a hobby and I've read about this, so I have some sense of the lingo.
 
You can get a a couple of forms of 'aberration' (distortion, basically) so disregard this if you find a bench magnifying lamp that claims to be 'aplanatic' which means it's corrected for these things. 

I found the one I used had:
Spherical aberration, the object is larger or smaller at the center than it is towards the edges of the lens. (which is true of a lot of eyeglasses, but much much less noticable because of size/how they're used.)
and Chromatic aberration, where basically the lens is acting as a prism, splitting up the bands of colors, you see red green and blue haze on the outlines of things. 

Bit of a ramble, one of those topics for me, I could go on. 

Edited December 14, 2015 by Ishima

[oldhippy]

What I had over my work bench was a strong strip light which didn't give off any heat and many different eye glasses. It was all artificial lighting as there wasn't any windows in my work shop, I bet you couldn't get away with that now. Back in the 70's when Heath was P M and I think it was called three day a week, when power went I couldn't do a thing in the pitch black, to top it off we didn't know when it would happen. They were the not so good old days.