Seeing the bigger picture

If you're finding it a little harder to read the phone book or can't thread a needle first go, Ian Macrae has been looking at a couple of small devices that may help

Magnification is not necessarily just for those of us with “low vision”. Many people, for many different reasons, find they benefit from having something that gives their sight a bit of a boost, maybe for close or fiddly tasks or for challengingly small print.

Although there are hundreds of magnifiers about, on a basic level, these days, you’re faced with two options.

At the more traditional and cheaper end of the market, there are optical magnifiers: hand-held lenses, usually made now of plastic, that may come with built-in illumination.

More expensive, but increasingly more affordable, are video magnifiers, which have come down in price since the advent of digital camera technology.

We’ve been looking at one of each, both relative newcomers.

First up, from Daylight, which specialises in illuminated optical lenses, is the nifty little Medicine Bottle Magnifier.

Fitting easily into the palm of your hand, this is designed specifically to enable you to read the print on medicine bottle labels.

It has a spring clip which grasps the bottle under the lens.

Also below the lens are two of Daylight’s trademark high powered, high quality LED lamps, which means you can put a little light on the subject.

Although the field of view is fine, the magnification, at around 3x, wasn’t sufficient for me with my low vision needs. However, colleagues said it did the job perfectly for them.

As I’ve hinted, this little magnifier clearly has the edge on price, coming in at £14.99.

Meanwhile, at around £350, our next contender for review will make a rather larger demand on your pocket. But here we have to be wary about not comparing apples with oranges.

The compact Mini from Dutch-based company Optelec looks rather like a small sat nav unit. On its back face there’s a camera lens and three powerful LED lamps. The front is taken up by a 3.5 inch screen.

When powered up, it offers 5x, 7x and 11x magnification. There is also a range of viewing options including yellow print on blue, white on black, black on white and full colour.

There is also a snapshot button which is particularly useful for capturing something that’s not in a good position for viewing directly, like prices on supermarket shelves.

Its main drawback is that, being hand-held, it’s of little use for jobs that require the use of both hands. There is a fold-away stand, but It’s of limited practical use.

The magnifier gives a good stable image when moved over a page and battery life is quite good, at around two hours of constant usage, although its performance is likely to be compromised by powering up and down.

This really is an area, then, where you pays your money and you takes your choice: cheap and cheerful optical magnifiers with fixed magnification or more expensive but more flexible video units.