#slide viewer

[travelling-my-little-pony]

Photo Finish is visiting the Camera Museum!

In London, England.

This is photo 151 of 365.

A bit more about the museum at:

www.cameramuseum.uk

[vintageslideshow]

What a difference a light makes!

Incandescent bulb that came in a slide viewer:

LED bulb from eBay that I replaced it with:

[vintage-tech]

The second time I've found a second-gen Opti-Vue slide viewer. There's no on/off switch on the one I own. But I'm thinking... why would there need to be one since the light only lights when you insert a slide to press the contacts inside together?

[danismm]

Johnson Viewers, 1961

[vintageslideshow]

Yesterday's find at the thrift was a knockoff of an Agfa 135B pocket slide viewer. A knockoff!! Who knew that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery? So. The batteries inside were corroded but the contacts weren't damaged so they buffed up nicely, the bulb was dead but I have a spare (out of one of the other slide viewers I'd done an LED upgrade to, LOL!), and two AAA batteries later it works.

[vintageslideshow]

Church rummage sale find: a Craftsmen's Guild 'Mini-Vuer' slide viewer, a very simple viewer made of Bakelite with one lens that you hold up to a strong light. The seller said that no one at the sale knew what it was until a 15-year-old girl told them, which gives me some hope for the present generation. :-D

[vintageslideshow]

Today's slide viewer find (someone please stop me!!) is an AGFA 'Agfascop 20' from the 1970s, which has a 15 watt bulb inside powered by a wall plug, and has a ground glass lens that provides 4x magification, a step above the 2x of the best handheld battery models. In construction and use it's very similar to the Sawyer/GAF 'Panavue Automatic' in that you manually force a slide in the view chamber with a tang on the right, and the viewed slide pops out into a tray on the left when the next slide is shoved in; difference being that the Panavue turns off the light while the tang is inserted where the Agfascop just leaves the light on at all times.

There was a less colorful 1980s model also, with the improvement of adding an inline switch on the cord so you don't have to unplug it to turn the light off. (Photo from an eBay listing.)

For some reason the folks online who have the manual are selling the PDF, rather than uploading it to the manual sites. The way around that is watching the folks on YouTube who demonstrate the unit. :)

Below is an advertisement from the 1970s that also speaks of a hotshoe flash unit for AGFA cameras.

[vintage-tech]

So it turns out Sears had its own slide viewer, a rebranded or knockoff inspired by the Sawyer/GAF Pana-Vue.