I cheated.....broke down and bought myself a digital microscope.
Had wanted one for a while but price kept me away. Needed to check out some goodies and wanted to chart some coins before sending them for grading.
The salt is only about 150x zoom. It gets pretty silly at higher magnifications, but you have no clue what your actually looking at. At the higher powers germs and microbes start to show themselves........ and you get incredibly uncomfortable with how clean your home is.
Has a birth of about 1.5 inch so I can look at specimens of any size if just dorking around at the 50x-300x or so power.
Here is a frito corn chip at about 175x.......
