Patent ID: 7542202

Claim:
A microscope comprising: a switching mechanism which has a plurality of lens units disposed thereon, and which inserts only one selected lens unit out of the plurality of lens units into an observation light path and disposes all of the other non-selected lens units outside the observation light path; and a control unit which controls a movement speed of a stage, onto which a sample is placeable, in an optical axis direction according to an observation power of the selected lens unit inserted into the observation light path by the switching mechanism; wherein the plurality of lens units disposed on the switching mechanism include: (i) a plurality of fixed-power lens units which are lens units comprising a combination of imaging lenses and objective lenses, and whose observation powers when observing the sample mutually differ, and (ii) a zoom lens unit which has a continuously changeable observation power; and wherein the control unit is configured to acquire the observation power of the zoom lens unit based on a rotation angle of a motor driven to change the observation power of the zoom lens unit.