Teaching materials science involves a lot of knowledge on a variety of materials such as carbon, polymers, metals, glass, and ceramics. These lessons help students characterize and analyze materials for their properties, purity, and possible use in engineering, using a variety of optics, contrasting methods such as brightfield, polarized light, or oblique illumination, and software in the process.

Suppliers and manufacturers need to inspect PCBs in a cost-effective way. The ultimate goal is ensuring and optimizing product performance and lifetime. The performance of PCBs, single-sided, double-sided, or multilayer, is critically influenced by soldering, through holes, and components, like diodes, IC chips, and capacitors, which all must be checked. Inspection must address questions like: Are the pins too close? Is the orientation and polarity correct? To show compliance with the defined specifications, reliable and accurate documentation is always a must. You may also require imaging solutions that can assist with the development of PCBs and components.

Commonly used in forensic laboratory work, stereo microscopes are low power microscopes that provide three-dimensional views of specimens visible to the naked eye. Stereo microscopes utilize binocular eyepieces and are often enhanced with digital features. Modern optical microscopes often feature digitized controls and digital optical sensors that replace the eyepieces. These digital microscopes offer greater analysis capabilities by comparison, such as on-screen measurements, feature enumeration, three-dimensional reconstruction of an object, and stitching and tiling of images.

Microscopes are not limited to magnification of visible light and technology exists that can resolve features of nanoscale.