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Loupe/magnifying glass


Jon O'Brien

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What is a good way to minutely examine individual frames of negative? I thought an obvious way would be to get a light table, sandwich film between it and a sheet of glass, and use a hand lens or jeweller's loupe. Is there a better way - can you buy a small gadget that can simply be held up to the light? I'd prefer that, instead of using a light table. I looked on B&H but can't find such a thing so far.

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Hi Jon,

 

There were these loupes you used on a light table (or even on the fresnel screen of a 4x5 (or bigger) view cameras) as you said,

these can be held against the light, maybe not the sun to protect your eyes but against the open sky.

Second I had a so-called linen tester (wikipedia that), was really a mini loupe the size of a billyard cane chalker They used it to literally count the lines of a (classic cmyk) print on the paper. The have a bigger magnification, but often they were made from metal so watch it they might scratch your neagtive.

Regards,

Phil

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Are you looking for scratches, or just viewing details? If scratches, a jeweller's eyeglass-the sort you hold in the eye socket- is probably the simplest thing- the magnification goes from about 5-20x. The cheaper ones are plastic but quite acceptable- just a few £. Just wear cotton gloves.

Or you can slot a strip of film into one of these- it's plastic, so kinder to the film

https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/AP-2x-Magnification-Handheld-Daylight-Slide-Viewer/1843460776?iid=201377225391&chn=ps

but the magnification is rather less. They seem to be hard to get nowadays- if there's an old-fashioned camera shop in your town, it's the sort of thing they might have gathering dust.

While you're waiting, you might manage with a strong magnifying glass if you have one lying around.

Edited by Mark Dunn
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Just viewing details, lens tests mainly, getting a better idea of what's in the image. I won't be doing prints or projecting, everything will be scanned, so I'd like to see what's actually on the negative, even if just individual frames here and there. Perhaps I'm being fussy. Thanks guys, very helpful to me.

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Some excellent advice, thank you. I've started out just holding the film in my hand, using daylight, and a very nice Carl Zeiss 9x handlens and an achromatic 20x. The image literally looks as big or bigger than what you see in a cinema and I can see the size of the grain in relation to image detail.

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