Firefly DE300 Polarizing Handheld USB Digital Dermascope/Dermatoscope/Microscope

If you or someone in your family has ever had a melanoma, you realize how important it is to watch skin lesions to see if they evolve. With this dermatoscope, you can create serial images of suspicious moles and see if they are changing over time. It can actually save someone's life! This product is easy to use and creates very workable images for comparison. Just make sure you take several images each time with different polarization angles to get the best pictures.

I am a family physician and own a Dermlite DL3N dermatoscope. I liked the Firefly DE300A because is priced right and provides imaging of the skin lesions which can be shown to patients real time on the computer screen. However, its limitation is that it lacks detail of the images when magnified. This is because, in my opinion, it needs more polarizing lights (Firefly has 8 while the Dermlite has 12), the polarizing twist dial is hard to set correctly for maximum polarization, and it has only 2 megapixel resolution. Firefly needs more megapixels to really see the skin lesions in detail when magnified. What I have found optimal is to attach my Dermlite dermatoscope to an iPhone 4S and use the camera app (which has 8 megapixel resolution) for picture taking. The pictures can then be shown to the patient and uploaded to the electronic medical record. Also, when the images are enlarged the details are not lost. The Firefly may be a useful instrument for the family physician if it increases it megapixels to at least 4mp, adds more polarizing lights and has a on/off switch instead of a dial for turning on the polarizing function.

Good manifacture & easy to use. Software adequate, it saves photos as .bmp : even tought this format is well known in windows, it produces big files compared with compressed formats like .jpg. You can convert big .bmp, but I think it should be better to acqure directly compressed formats. I tryied to change settings to obtain this result but at the end there the program saved always pictures as .bmp. Useful polarized light: it avoid need of immersion oil in dermatoscopy use. In concusion it's worth of the price.

Detail of magnification poor

Software needs work.