VA-980-WiFi Bundle: Vividia AbleScope VA-980 USB Semi-Flexible Articulating Borescope Plus VA-B2 WiFi AirBox for iPad iPhone and Android

Scientific Oasis makes a number of different, handy, inspection gadgets, and they all work to some degree pretty well. I am a fan of their VM Tiny. I have the shorter version of this VA-980 scope, the VA-920, but supposedly everything else is the same. These are NOT Keyence microscopes, and the shots are only 640x480 resolution, but you can do a lot with such an image. Normally articulating borescopes costs you a lot more than this one, and this one does "work" reasonably well. The reason I gave it only 3 stars is the software that is supposed to make it do what it can do, just cannot even find the device! I have illustrated this problem in the screenshot attached, which illustrates the output of two different Oasis applications at the same time, running simultaneously on the same laptop, with the VA-920 on and attached to the laptop. The screen on the left is from the Oasis Vividia Ablescope software. If this software worked it would provide you about 85% of the capability of the far more expensive Dinolite. The image on the right is from the VA-920 looking realtime at my Alt key on my PC using the "Oasis.exe" software, which is also on their webpage. In the upper left of the left screen you can see I asked the Ablescope software to "preview all cameras" and you can see this software can't seem to find ANY camera attached to my PC, and certainly not the Ablescope, even when their other software is displaying the device output real time on the right-hand screen. I have repeated this exercise on this laptop, but also on my desktop. I always get the same result. This is really a shame because the Ablescope software offers you the option of combing images with different depth of focus. The top end Dinolite will do this automatically, but costs 3X more. The camera focus "hunts" a bit, but the articulation works as advertised. The adjustable end lighting works very well. The articulating end of this scope works about 10X better than a mirror you can get for cheaper rigid borescopes, not to mention giving you 0 to 180 degrees instead of just 90 degrees.