Gemological Spectroscope

This item gives you a vague idea of the spectrum, but it is hard to see it all due to the small eyepiece. Rubies and Spinel are easy but others are more difficult to see. Spend the money and buy a better one.

useless with out the spectral reference chart, I rigged up a flash light with tape and shield to view the gem, but they all looked the same and no chart to verify reading.

This is a great little field tool to have if you are going gem hunting. It definitely saved my butt a few times when negotiating with others over legitimacy or not and prices for stones. I am never leaving home on a hunt without this guy!

The Spectroscope was great to use for identifying stones. It was easy to learn how to use it. I highly recommend it if stone identification is something you plan to do a lot, especially for locating a garnet among other similarly colored stones. The Garnet having so much Carbon, blocks out huge areas of the spectrum. A case and point was that I used my new Spectroscope to ID a wrongly labeled Pink Garnet that had been sold as a "Tourmaline". If I hadn't had the Spectroscope I would not have caught the error and therefore would have been wrongly charged for the cost of the stone.

I purchased this spectroscope for gemological applications but have also found it useful for general spectroscopy. I have found this very useful for qualitatively assessing light sources. It is very easy to see the differences between incandescent, CFL and white LED sources. It's clearly important to start with a full spectrum light source when assessing gemstones.

I have owned my Scope for a couple months now. It shows a very blurry out of focus Spectrum. It would be nice to identify at least where the center of the color is. If you can't hold it perfectly still or rig a stand for it you won't be able to read much of anything.. I was able to read the Spectra of Ruby, Tourmaline (Indicolite), and a red Garnet. I wasn't right on but close enough to identify them. Most others I didn't get a reading at all, saw no Lines or Shaded Bands. I am going to get a better one and I would not recommend this one for identifying Gemstones. Lots of others uses though and can be a lot of fun..

Comes with a nice carrying case... don't leave home without yours when going to gargage sales