P3D Re: Taylor Merchant stereo viewer

[Paul Talbot <ptww@xxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Abrahams wrote:
> 
> On page 35 of the new (July/Aug) 1998 Stereo World is an ad from
> Taylor Merchant for a folding stereo slide viewer for $3.50.   Has
> anyone tried these?

If this is the black cardboard folding viewer, yes I have tried them.

> I find that to get people interested in slides, I need to pass them
> out, and need to include a viewer.  How do they compare to the others
> of the 'under $10' range?

You can mail one for $.55 in a small envelope, so they are very
convenient for distributing to non-local folks you want to have
look at some stereo slides.  Unfortunately, the viewer has a few
significant disadvantages.  The cardboard is pretty low quality.
It sheds significant amounts of dust.  I bought ten viewers to
distribute to family members, and had to take all of them apart
to clean the dust off the diffuser (and some dust would return
almost instantly).  The diffusers also had black streaks I could not
remove.  I eventually discovered the ink used to make the cardboard
black bleeds easily.  One slide that was put into and out of the
viewer several times got black fingerprints all over the white
cardboard mount; I had to remount the slide before giving it away.

I like that this viewer does not allow a lot of excess light
around the sides of the slide the way the plastic Radex viewer
does.  But the aperture is too small vertically for a normal
slide.  It cuts off a bit of the top of the image, even if you
push the slide down solidly;  the amount cut off is *very* small
but it is still distracting.  I tried cutting a sliver off the
bottom of a cardboard mount to make the entire image visible.
After doing so, however, part of the bottom of the image was darkly
shaded by one layer of the carboard holding the diffuser in place.

The viewer is quite compact when folded, so it doesn't take up
much space if carrying in the field to help answer all the
"What kind of camera is *that*?" questions.

Judging by my experience with other stereo products, it is quite
possible I got all of the "bad batch" and no one else will have
these sorts of problems with the Taylor-Merchant viewer.  :-)

Paul Talbot


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