Re: [photo-3d] Digest Number 124, next step from Realist

[Olivier Cahen <o_cahen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

	I never had a Realist, so that I am not the best person to answer this
question, but I can tell you how I managed without a Realist. I started
fifty-five years ago, when my grandma gave me the genuine vintage 1893
Verascope by
Jules Richard of my grandfather who died duiring the war.
	I was rapidly upset by the need to use glass plates, to develop them
myself in the dark, to scratch them because I was not so clever, and so
on.
	Long time later, I heard of the Stéréo-Club Français and I learned how
to make stereo pictures. I bought another camera identical to the
Olympus OM10 I already had, and I made a large number of stereo pictures
with some heavy synchronism problems.
	At the ISU Congress in Paris in 1991 I saw the new RBT cameras and I
ordered one. It was definitely the end of my sync problems, but not the
end of my camera problems. This RBT camera (a double Yashica 108) is
heavy and not completely reliable. It failed a few times and Mr.
Oehmichen (the boss of RBT) helped me as much as he could, but never
definitely arranged the problems. My camera failed again during my trip
to Yellowstone, last summer. It took several months to find what was
wrong (something mechanical in the film stepping), now it works. I heard
some complaints about the S1 (too hard to disconnect the self-focus if
you want pictures to be sharp to the infinite) and about the X2 (some
professionals to whom I recommended it bought three units and one of
them had a vertical deviation over .3 mm). So I now think that the RBT
is not the ideal stereo camera, but the best being now available for
people accepting a price over two thousand buck and a delivery time over
one year.
	I attended the ISU Council meeting at the Atlanta Congress in 1995.
Then Bill Duggan proposed to work on a project to be submitted to camera 
manufacturers, as a definition of the requirements for a stereo camera.
I wrote a project that was translated into English with the help of
Jean Soulas, then submitted via the Web. I received a few comments about
this project, none of them was actually opposing my ideas. This project
is still available on the Web, on the site of the Stéréo-Club Français:
	http://www.cnam.fr/scf/
If you want to find this project on this site, click on the last word
"techniques" at the fourth line after the first white frame, then click
on the last words "in English" at the end of the page. You can download
the text and answer if you like.
	That project was written in 1996, and I think that it is still
up-to-date, except if someone is able to sell a digital stereo camera
with the same resolution as the film.