The slide projector - An old fart's memories.

[TVTeufel]

I was cleaning out my lady-friend's basement storage closet, & stumbled upon several boxes of slides. "Ooo", says lady-friend. "You got a slide viewer"?
I said "Yeah' - somewhere. This started it all. I found my old GAF Pana-View, & tried to scrape all the green scuzz from the battery contacts, but it wouldn't work. Bulb? Tried Radio Shack, but no match. Then I remembered my now 46 year old Sears Tower (Argus) state-of-the-art tray projector that I'd buried in a drawer somewhere. I found it, along with a couple dozen full trays, & an ungodly number of slides still in their boxes. Hmmmmm....
I then searched for, & found a slightly mildewed roll-up screen.

I worked for Sears (then Sears Roebuck & Co.) part time as a starving college student back in the early '60s, in the camera department, & made a whopping $22.00 a week for about 17 hours of work. That projector cost then about $69.00, so fortunately no mortgage payment was in my life - just gas at thirty cents per.

I guess I last used that projector around 30 years ago. So, I grab several slide trays, set up the almost SOLID METAL projector on the dining room table, plug 'er in, & pray. Viola! The fan hums, the light comes on, AND the tray advances as advertised when pushing the WIRED remote control button.
69 bucks well spent! My lady-friend comes over with her pile of loose slides, &
inserts them into a tray, mostly upside down, & backwards, but certainly viewable. We had a good time that evening, with a couple bottles of Aussie wine, a CD (bowing to current, but soon to be obsolete technology) of '50 & '60s oldies to dance to, & plenty "Oh my Gawd, is that me"? comments on the slide show. The next day, as by now I'm really into this "new" magic, I try to load a tray with some boxed slides I haven't really viewed before, & the bulb blows.

So now I search on-line for a bulb. Found the cheapest to be 25 bucks with shipping. Ordered it. Found some used trays for 6 bucks each, & ordered 4.
I've found a "new" toy to throw money upon. But it makes me happy.
The slides have retained their vivid colors, & look great on the big screen. For this reason I see no purpose to invest in a Hi-Def TV on which to view current "reality" garbage. Reality is what I see on that old glass beaded screen. :thmbsp:

Sigh.....


Ron.

 

[Dan ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

Cool! My middle brother enjoyed shooting color slides and B&W print film back in the late 60's to mid 70's. He had two projectors, one was a nice Kodak Carousel and the other was a neat little GAF that had a 5" (or so) viewing screen and with the flip of a lever, would become a projector. The slides loaded on the left in a tray and as you changed slides, would stack themselves to the right. Always tickled me a bit to see the image "move" a bit as the slide warmed up from the projector bulb.

 

[vinyldavid]

I got a slide projector, and I want to start shooting slides instead of digital soon....Just gotta get a SLR, and some slide film.

 

[Mark W.]

LOL might be old tech but as the moderator of a Photography forum on Photo.net I can tell you one heck of a lot of people still shoot slides and still project them.

I myself have a pair of really nice Kodak 850H's and I even have a dissolve unit that if I had the energy I could setup to change slides to a music cue.

In fact I have been looking for a third project as backup.

 

[OvenMaster]

Oh, man. I have a Rollei P350 straight-tray projector somewhere in my basement. I haven't used it in maybe 20 years; for the longest time, all I shot was slide film. Ah, the good old days!
*pic obtained from craigslist; unit shown is not mine, but representative*

 

[ozmoid]

...on that old glass beaded screen.

THAT is some hi-definition viewing! I love the glass screens, bright and sharp and fabulous looking images. :yes: I have a couple of projectors and a nice glass-beaded screen. Really ought to use it more than I do.

 

[70salesguy]

Predeliction for slides

When in college and while 70salesguy, I shot mostly slides for one reason.....$$$.

It was a lot cheaper to process a roll of slide film than prints. I was shooting with a Minolta SRT-101 35mm. I shot some great pictures over the years.

Kept watching the classified ads until I found a good deal on a "cube type" projector. Can't remember the brand, but of course, I still have it.

Periodically I drag it out and look at all the old slides. The wife runs and hides.

 

[AnalogDigit]

Cool! It is nice to get away from all the digital madness that is out there and look at film, listen to a record, listen to a open reel deck and remember how things used to be.

I remember my neighbor next door around 1970 had a projector and both our families used to watch Laurel and Hardy movies on 8mm film crowded around the screen eating popcorn. I kind of miss those days!

Sounds like you had a lot of fun! :thmbsp:

 

[old_tv_nut]

I started out shooting slides for the reduced cost also. Used to buy the processing mailers and send them in from the road on vacation, and have them waiting when I got back. Tried developing some anscochromes of my own - that was OK but scary for the possibility of losing the originals if I goofed. Inthe 80's printed on Cibachrome, and still ahve the LR decorated with prints. Since computer scanners have become both good and relatively inexpensive, I'd recommend scanning in any you really want to save. Projection fades slides quicker than you realize -fortunately, they are only on for a few seconds. I know from our use at the old Zenith lab that they would fade within a few hours of continuous use. We had some favorite test pictures for TV sets, which we always had dupes made of, and kept the originals in a dark place. Had a similar experience when in college we set up kiosks with continuously running slide show - they faded within a few days even though they were cycling through an 80 slide carousel.
Kodachrome - best dark stability, poor light stability;
Ektachrome - less dark stability, slightly better light stability.

 

[Dan ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

I had a 8mm Kodak projector that I bought at TG&Y for my birthday in 8th or 9th grade. Super 8 was out and they had the 8mm marked down cheap. It came in a really nice cloth covered wooden case. A friend had an old keywound, 3 lens Brownie 8mm camera that he gave me to shoot movies with (still have it!). But the main reason I got the projector was our local library allowed you to check out 8mm movies and they had a H U G E library of them too! Most were B&W, but many were classics from the silent era along with subtitled releases thru the 50's. We'd get together on Saturday night, pop popcorn, ice down sodas and cue up Swan Lake to play along with The Mummy or some other great horror title. Always ran a reel or two of cartoons before the main attraction though.

 

[old_tv_nut]

Some more musings: the disadvantage of slides compared to negatives is the need for much stricter exposure control. My Canon EF's internal meter was good. The match-needle rangefinder that was loaned to me for the NYWF was not so accurate, especially at low levels, resulting in a lot of missed exposures. The pix in my avatar were all overexposed and have a tremendous amount of correction in Photoshop to make them reasonably acceptable. I'd say slide exposure is generally hoped to be within +/- 1/3 stop to get the effect you want, and acceptable with +/- 1/2 stop. Negative film has a huge range by comparison. The throw away cameras with 800 speed film are generally designed to overexpose by 3 stops (8 times!) in direct sunlight, so they have more sensitivity for shade and flash shots. It's all compensated in the printing.
Digital cameras are similar to slide fillm in not tolerating overexposure, but live viewing helps see a problem when it occurs so it can be fixed by retaking the shot.

 

[Fisherdude]

Have a bunch of friends and family over, put the screen up, make some popcorn, and look at vacation pics.

Memmmmmorriieeesssss.......

 

[Web Police]

Brings back memories for me too. I have thousands of slides I shot from the 1970's and 1980's :yes:

 

[TVTeufel]

I'm enjoying your comments, folks. Yes, we all took slides over prints back then due to cost. If the slide was a keeper, you'd make a print. No sweat. Most of my sentimental stuff was shot by another Sears "on the cheap" camera, a Tower (Olympus) Wide-E 35mm 3.5 thing that didn't have (or need) a range finder, but a nice built-in light meter. That thing was so forgiving - at F11 & 1/100 sec. everything was in focus from 5 ft. to infinity. I paid $19.95 less Sear's employee discount for it - years later lent it to my daughter to learn basic photography, & still have it working 100% after lots of abuse. :tears:

Ron.

 

[Arkay]

"Slide shows" were an important part of childhood for me. Periodically my parents would set up the slide projector, usually projecting on a white sheet hung over a huge cupboard-thing (and eventually onto a proper sceen), and show slides from previous vacation trips, previous homes we'd (they'd) lived in, etc... It added a sense of common history to the family.

Guess it left an impression, because I've shot slides for years until recently. Stopped because I left my camera and lenses in the camera back for a month a few summers ago. Mold attacked the lens coatings. :sigh: :tears: Durned tropical climates! Serves me right for spending $2000 (Nikon professional stuff that I thought I'd use for a lifetime!) on gear and scrimping on the $50 airtight box! :nono:

As for longevity, THE LONGEST-LASTING IMAGES in the world are Kodachrome slides, kept properly in clean, cool and dark surroundings. The technology goes back to the 1930s, and remains both nearly the highest-resolution (down to molecular size of the individual crystals) and longest-lasting image retention technology. Assuming your lenses and focus are good, you can blow up a good Kodachrome snap to cinema-screen size and it will still be quite clear and detailed.

All my slides were kodachrome: although the oldest slide-film technology, IMO it remains the best. The only drawback is that there are no more than a dozen places left on the planet that will develop it (as of a few years ago when I stopped shooting; now there may be fewer?), so you have to mail them off to get them developed. Adding the cost of the film to the cost of the mailers (which must be bought separately), it came out considerably MORE expensive than prints, so I'm surprised to read about you guys shooting slides to save money(!). Maybe things changed over the years, or maybe Hong Kong is just topsy-turvy(?).

Of course, PROJECTION (bright light) still causes the images to deteriorate. I keep my slides (several thousand) in archival-quality boxes. Had a number of them published in magazines over the years, but don't really flog them anywhere.

A few days ago, I spotted a pair of cinema slide projectors in the wholesale audio market here in Hong Kong. They had large, heavy steel boxes both underneath and behind the projector mechanism itself. Extremely well-made; from the look of them they'd probably last several lifetimes, and I was tempted to get one, but... (1) I dont' know where I'd get bulbs, nor what they would cost, and (2) I imagined you need some distance --more than I have in my living room!-- to focus them properly, since they are set up with theater lenses. (3) The intensity of that thing would fade the slides much faster than a normal home projector, I'm pretty sure. I still have one or two projectors, a light box and magnifiers (for sorting slides), etc...

I got a scanner with slide-scanning attachment, but it won't function properly with my old computer, even after upgrading. All I could get was --literally-- a slide-sized picture on my screen when I'd scanned the slides, and couldn't enlarge it. Maybe I used the wrong format, but it seemed nothing else would work, either, so I gave up (for now).

 

[Luckyman]

Wow, I have an oldie in the attic, I wonder if it still works...............

My Mom won it at the Boardwalk in Seaside Heights for $.25. She then
threw another $.25 on the board for the wheel of chance, and won a
vacuum cleaner!:yippy:

 

[old_tv_nut]

Ditto on the Kodachrome dark longevity. Original Viewmaster reels were reproduced on Kodachrome, and are still good 70 years later. The only color photographic methods that are longer lived are:
1) Technicolor dye imbibition ("IB") prints
2) Longest-lived of all, black and white color separation negatives, which are the basis for the Technicolor IB prints. If these are preserved, they actually provide a basis for better color prints as printing technology is improved. Warner Bros. showed some clips of their experimental work to the SMPTE. By electronically scanning and registering the color separations, it is possible to see much detail in classic old movies like "Robin Hood" that has never been visible in the theater.

 

[Arkay]

Ditto on the Kodachrome dark longevity. Original Viewmaster reels were reproduced on Kodachrome, and are still good 70 years later. The only color photographic methods that are longer lived are:
1) Technicolor dye imbibition ("IB") prints
2) Longest-lived of all, black and white color separation negatives, which are the basis for the Technicolor IB prints. If these are preserved, they actually provide a basis for better color prints as printing technology is improved. Warner Bros. showed some clips of their experimental work to the SMPTE. By electronically scanning and registering the color separations, it is possible to see much detail in classic old movies like "Robin Hood" that has never been visible in the theater.

Sure would like to see some of the old B/W movies with more of the original detail, like that. I've often wondered why they aren't digitally scanned and "cleaned" a bit more, especially when I see them sometimes with dust-flecks and such that should be removeable/correctable. Big fan of old movies here; in general, I tend to prefer them to most modern ones, despite the technical advances in color, animation, etc... Combination of the more human story lines and the "window into history" effect, even if it is an entirely fictitious, potted history. Just the level of technology, street shots, etc... reminds one of how much --and how fast-- the world has changed, and in what ways people themselves have and haven't changed.

 

[pioneervato]

When in college and while 70salesguy, I shot mostly slides for one reason.....$$$.

It was a lot cheaper to process a roll of slide film than prints. I was shooting with a Minolta SRT-101 35mm. I shot some great pictures over the years.

Kept watching the classified ads until I found a good deal on a "cube type" projector. Can't remember the brand, but of course, I still have it.

Periodically I drag it out and look at all the old slides. The wife runs and hides.

My first SLR was the SRT-101. Great camera and built like a tank. Bell & Howell made a "cube" projector. Very popular in its day as it was cheaper than carousels. I worked in the Camera & Jewelry Dept. at K-Mart when I was in college. We used to sell a lot of the Bell & Howell's.

 

[70salesguy]

Bell & Howell

My first SLR was the SRT-101. Great camera and built like a tank. Bell & Howell made a "cube" projector. Very popular in its day as it was cheaper than carousels. I worked in the Camera & Jewelry Dept. at K-Mart when I was in college. We used to sell a lot of the Bell & Howell's.

You are correct, sir!

It is indeed a Bell & Howell. I liked them because they used the little cubes instead of the circular trays or long trays.

I found one in the classified ads and bought it cheap because it needed a new lamp. Installed a new lamp and I was in business! I still have it and it works great!

I bought the SRT-101 because it offered a lot of features and good quality for a reasonable price. I was a college kid and bought it on "lay-a-way". I knew a guy who sold photo gear and he wanted a deal on a tape deck.

Voila! I got a deal on the camera and he got a deal on the tape deck. :yes:

Still have the Minolta as well (I keep everything).