T3D Advice sought on home-made beam splitter

[Dogbreath <hopi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.

I would like to make my own beam splitter and I wonder if any of you out
there have any experience with them. I may be mistaken, but my notion of a
beam splitter is a device that allows you to make stereo exposures with a
single-shutter camera by dividing and expanding the perspective of a given
lens. The cheapo Argus stereo camera seems to employ this principle. I've
seen them also in kits for Polaroid Land cameras. They seem to be little
more than a simple housing with four mirrors, each arranged to gather light
from two seperate perspectives and then reflect it until it can enter the
lens as a united stereo pair on a single frame of film. My thought was to
build one for use on a 4x5 camera. If I were to cut a darkslide in half
length-wise, each pair would then be comprised of two 2x2.5 images. Of
course, the business of making a medium format viewer would have to be
undertaken, too, but I'm thinking that such things have been made
successfully by more than a few participants of this list. If there are web
sites which explain the design and fabrication of the sort of beam splitter
I'd like to make, please steer me their way. If there are kits available,
I'd like to hear about them.

Thanks for your time!

Dwib




------------------------------

End of TECH-3D Digest 505
*************************