
#VIEWFINDER SLIDES FULL#
Perhaps your had a parent or grandparent who was an avid photographer in their day, and you’ve just inherited a suitcase full of slides. Dropping a slide into a slide viewer allows you to step back in time and see the people and places of years gone by, often in breathtaking color and detail. Slides, especially when kept in the proper conditions, can keep their color and contrast consistent for years. While there are photographers out there who still shoot with slide film (also referred to as transparency film), the vast majority of consumers interested in a slide viewer are looking for the same thing my sister and I got out of our little key chains: a connection to the past. When we lost our Nana some 12 years later, we still had the key chains, and the slides inside them became even more precious to us. My sister and I lost our grandpa when I was two and she was four, and we kept these key chains to remind us of him. In both pictures they look, as they were always described to me, incredibly happy. The key chains each held a picture of our grandparents, one of the two of them standing in front of their house, and the other of the two of them at a fancy dinner many years before I was distant forethought.

At the wider end was a small slate of translucent plastic, behind which sat a tiny piece of slide film. At the narrower end was a little piece of glass up to which you could put your eye. They were little key chains shaped like cheerleaders’ bull horns, but squared instead of rounded. When I was a kid, my sister and I inherited a pair of rudimentary slide viewers from our grandparents. Note that most of these simple choices do not include either an adapter or AA batteries, so you'll need to provide your own. We've also changed the Kaiser Diascop Mini for the 3x magnification version, as the 2x version with the small screen is simply too small for most users. These are not for large archival projects instead, they are for casual viewing, including for quickly deciding which images are worth saving and which are not. As for simpler models, we've kept the Pana-Vue 2 and The Imaging World Medalight. The Wolverine Titan is a fairly similar choice that's slightly more expensive, but it does arrive with a 32-gigabyte SD memory card, a nice touch for those who may not have one lying around. It not only lets you see your old slides, but it also allows you to convert them to digital files so that they are easier to view, store, and share in the future. This viewer is not manufactured by View-Master, which is a trade mark of Mattel Inc.Because it offers a range of features, we still think the Kodak Scanza is a tough model to beat. The build quality compares very well to the original View-Master viewers of years gone by, and are ideal for PR events, product promotions, novelty gifts and so on. Made in China and is supplied in a clear plastic drum. It is solidly engineered with good quality moulded plastics and assembled with screws (not snapped-together) and has a great reel-advance action. The viewer body colour density combined with the black internal advance plate bring you the brightest images by cutting down on extraneous incidental light inside the viewer. The lenses are excellent quality and are not the pressed plastic found in cheaper viewers (which often have air bubbles and striations that make less than perfect viewing). The lenses enjoy the largest “sweet spot” centre for maximum acuity among any reel viewer produced today. The single control, dual-lens focusing knob brings images into sharp focus for almost all eyes, and are suitable for spectacle wearers.


No batteries required, simply point towards a light source such as a window or table lamp. They will even advance the extra thick USA-made “Image 3D” plastic reels. The 3D Reel ViewFinder™ effortlessly advances all View-Master reels. From the birth of View-Master in 1939 until the present, View-Master reels have varied slightly in thickness (some 3/100s of an inch), causing some reels (the thinner ones) to fail to advance. Takes any View-Master reel from across the decades – including our own custom Retro-View reels and your own DIY reels.

This high quality focusing viewer is especially engineered to function smoothly and effortlessly with all View-Master reels regardless of their age or thickness.
