EISCO Premium Quantitative Spectroscope - 400-700nm Range, 5nm Accuracy - for Studying Light Sources, Measuring Wavelengths & Color Spectra

Works fine for the price. I think the accuracy is overstated as plus and minus 5 nm, but for my lab, determining the wavelength of the output of various light-emitting diodes, it was accurate enough. Takes a couple of minutes to become adept with it.

Exactly what we needed for Chemistry classroom.

I needed to see if some red LED lights I had would be safe to use in my film developing lab - orthochromatic black and white film isn't sensitive to red light, but the light has to be very red - 600nm on up.Digital spectrometers are really expensive. But all I needed to see is if some lights I had were putting light out below that 600nm level.I wasn't sure if this spectrometer would be useful at all, given how cheap it was compared to all the other ones out there.You know what? It worked great for a rough estimate and let me quickly see that my red LED lights were far more wide spectrum than I thought and definitely not film safe.I highly recommend doing the mod with tinfoil to make the slit you look at the light with much thinner. (not the slit that allows the number scale to be backlit). This helps a bunch with getting a clearer view of the spectral lines. Took me about 30 seconds with some scissors, painter's tape and tinfoil.

This is not worth it, I didn't expect much having read reviews, needing to be modified and so on, however I found out why people use their cameras to see inside the device as the images of scale and numbers are illegible. I only wanted it to experience seeing the light spectrum and having that shown on a readable scale. It is junk, toy, garbage as most said, that is unless you are going to improve it by taking apart and only using a camera to read the scale.

To start, this is not a professional spectrophotometer or even spectrometer. (Did you expect one at this price?) It is a spectroscope, a lightweight device you can look through and see the colors emitted by an object. I turned it on a Soraa LED lamp (image above); Soraa makes the best such lamps. Most inexpensive LED lamps will have a bright emission line somewhere near 450 nm (4.5 on the scale shown), then a broad emission spectrum (the conversion phosphor) from around 580-650 nm. This has five visible lines: 435 nm (the wavelength of the driving LED), 485 nm (cyan), 535 nm (green), 575 nm (yellow), and 600 nm (red). These numbers came from reading the spectroscope. Being an optical scientist, I was sure these were inaccurate, since I had thought Soraa's green phosphor was at 550 nm. It turns out the spectroscope was right.This is actually the second of these spectroscopes I have purchased. I thought I had broken my previous one, because if I looked at the LED light in my office with the spectroscope, I didn't see anything near the scale, but did see a spectrum off to the side. The side spectrum is always there, and should duplicate the spectrum by the scale. I couldn't see the spectrum from my lamp because the driving LED is at 405 nm (my glasses have a 405-nm blocking additive for this reason) and the broad phosphor spectrum is too dim. When I look at my monitor screen with the spectroscope I see three phosphor emissions, as I should; when I look at sunlight reflected from a white paper (NEVER look directly at the sun or at a laser with--or without--the spectroscope) there is a continuous spectrum.Overall, this is somewhat more than an educational toy, but definitely less than a professional instrument. At the price of $10-$15, though, you can't really go wrong. And, as it turns out, the accuracy is far better than I had thought.

totally what they say it is

Junk. It doesn't show spectral lines at all. Waste of money.

It has a great design and I was able to view the spectrum of space objects. The only problem is that my little kids moved the eye piece out of the way and now its not working... Careful with the little people! Its not a toy it's an instrument