Fuzzy View Master

[P3D Bob Shotsberger <bshots1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

More comments about Keith Wilson's and Dr. "T"'s Fuzzy
View Master Reels and views.

In building my collection which consists mainly of the single
reels and early packets, I have seen many of the Fuzzy View Master
reels such as Kieth is typing about they are mostly early 
US scenics (40's and 50's). 

When adding to my collection I look for several things, this issue of 
"fuzzy" being one of several issues.

First I look to see if I do or do not already have the reel
or packet. If I do have it, will this one be an upgrade or 
better condition copy than the one I already have? If it is a packet
is it all there? Is the carboard reel and it's printing in better condition
than the one I have? If it is the same title and reel number
does it have different views? Then, by looking at the reel I check 
for the "fuzziness" and color shifting of the view.

Here we ned to stop define "fuzzy" as meaning "out of focus", for
the entire view, with the foreground and middle and background all
being out of focus. I don't recall seeing or having any with parts
of the view in or out of focus like Keith writes he has. 

Mostly the reels I see with this problem are not consistent in all 
the views, some views usally are worse than other views on 
the same reel. I have seen a few reels where only one view was 
fuzzy and the rest okay and other reels where all views are equally fuzzy.

This out of focus condition is apparent no  matter what viewer you
use or even if if the view is projected. With this in mind,
I think "fuzzy" was a production problem where the settings 
of the machinery in the reproduction process were out of focus. I do 
not think was an error of wrong foucs settings on the camera(s) at 
the taking the original pictures.

Another reason I believe it was a reproduction problem is that 
in most cases, with common reels and views anyawy, I have found 
on another reel a good, sharply focused copy of the view.
In some cases the view has been reused by ViewMaster on a 
different version of the reel (sometimes up to six
reuses). A few I have not.

What bothers me as much as the focus problem is the color shifting 
(shifting may not be the best word here) in some views and reels. 
Some copies of the reels you find the colors are washed out, 
or overly dark. While other reels have perfect examples of
what Kodachrome color pictures should be like. On the shifted ones
mostly I find washed out ones, and only occasionly too dark
ones. It looks again like a production problem where either 
the machinery was set up wrong for exposing the film on that 
production run or depleted chemicals were being used for processing 
the film. Again this problem seems to be most prevalent in the 
40's and 50's reels. 

I do not know if the problem is equally common in both US and Belgian 
issues, but it defintely seems to be more of a US problem
probaly because of the differences in the production quanities.

I often wonder, were these fuzzy or color shifted reels early 
Monday or late Friday production runs? Obiously, View Master's 
Quality Control got better as they went along. Any way by the 
60's the problem seems to be pretty well gone.

In closing I too have a lot of duplicates to trade or sell, along
with my book which tells, for a 1,000 reels, which of those reels 
have duplicate views.

Bob Shotsberger






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