Loupes & Magnifiers

Loupes and magnifiers

BelOMO Triplet Loupe Magnifiers and Bausch & Lomb Loupe Magnifiers are must have accessories hanging around the neck of every geologist and rockhound. Magnifiers let you get up and personal with rocks and minerals. They allow you to really view minerals and the mineral crystals making up rocks. This is an important tool in rock and mineral identification.

We are proud to offer the BelOMO Triplet Loupe Magnifiers. The BelOMO line of magnifiers offers some of the best loupe magnifiers available on the market but at a price of the cheap imitation loupes. This is simply a case of you get more than you paid for.

A 10x (10 power) triplet is the standard field tool. It's just the right level of magnification to provide the best magnification, light capture, and depth of field.

Triplets are made of three (3) lenses. Every lens refracts (bends) the light passing through the glass. Different wavelengths (color) of light is bent a different amount. The combination of the 3 lenses bonded together to form one lens are engineered so that the light coming into the lens is corrected so that the light coming out of the lens is color correct, or the lens is achromatic correct. The triplet lens is also aplanatic meaning that the lens is corrected for spherical aberration making the image clear and in focus from the center to the edges.

Coddington lenses are two made of pieces of glass bonded together cut so as to minimize the image and color distortion but they are not achromatic or aplanatic.

Folding magnifiers, magnifiers made of of multiple lenses that fold in and out of a housing are handy for providing simple magnification at multiple levels but each lens and the air gap between each lens refracts the wavelengths a different amount. The image is distorted across the lens and the color you see are not the same as those of the object you're viewing.

Many of the cheap loupes available on the market are simply made of multiple magnifying lenses stacked on top of each other in a metal barrel. The result is gross image and color distortion, but at a very cheap price. They usually cost as much as a BelOMO Triplet Loupe Magnifier, but are pretty much worthless for usability.