Super helpful and informative! I have been looking into purchasing a stereo microscope for a while for plant, fungi, and lichen identifications and this answered a lot of my questions about different features that are out there.

Well, up to about 225x magnification, that’s very useful for very small items, which I use mine for very often. That may not be the sharpest view as a lot of that magnification is from the oculars rather than the objective. But it does a stronger objective as well. Working distance is enough for that purpose. What he’s saying is correct for people who don’t need high mag. If you do, then take what he’s saying as a general purpose set of info. But he doesn’t cover all uses. One thing I use it first is examining phono cartridge diamond styli. Those are very small and anything less than about 100 is useless while anything over that is increasingly better. These are tiny and depth of field just needs to be a small fraction of a mm. A common main objective is definitely more expensive, but much better.