Nigel Smith

Hi Don That's right - we went to Andrew Alden's repairer David Warren for the modification and he apparently passed it on to Mr Stent. The cameras are currently with Simon Challenor, who is the "Officially accredited Service Engineer for Bolex here in the UK", and David's successor. He spoke to Mr Stent and found him at best "unhelpful" and denying all responsibility. Thanks for the input Nigel

Sorry it took me a while to find out :) Martin Stent did the conversions in 2000. The camera with the crooked mask has been straightened. The parallax shift cannot be corrected though. :( Apparently the main casting of the front turret above the prism is masking the view. It should have been machined away? but it has 2 optics sitting on it which would then be unsupported... The aperture of 12.mm is blocked by 1.4mm, so the film captures more image camera right than the viewfinder sees - by about 10%. Apologies if this makes no sense. To cut a long story short, Mr Stent is no longer on my christmas card list!

Wow! Thanks a lot Nick. what an excellent explanation. :D

Hi I took over caring for 3 H16 Bolexes in a university facility a couple of years ago. The cameras were converted to Super 16mm about 5 years ago, here in the UK. After a couple of complaints from students i did some camera tests recently, and discovered that the framing is significantly out on the reflex viewfinder on all 3 cameras. They have a 'shift' of around 20% to the right, and one of them is also rotated about 20% clockwise ie crooked! I found a new camera engineer recently, who used to work for ARRI [we have an SR2 as well as the Bolexes], and he is attempting to re-align the cameras. He says that a shift of a few % is not uncommon, but our cameras are spectacularly bad. Has anybody out there experienced similar problems with conversions?