I recently purchased a Fuji 4x loupe, which is very crisp and clear. It was about $70-80 locally at Penn in Vienna VA (A store that seems to come up a lot on this list). I compared it with a few others including a Schnieder, I thought the Fuji had less distortion at the edges and I do believe that the lens is glass. I am very happy with it. I have also recently tried my LX FE-1 finder as a Loupe, I wanted more than 4x and the FE-1 was sitting there so I tried it. It actually seems to work OK, has anyone else tried this? The coating does seem to give colors a cooler appearance. I’m guessing it’s something like 6x (I don’t know)
As for light tables I recently acquired the Porta-trace 5K 11x18 for about the same price as the loupe from B&H, it’s OK, it seems to get a little dimmer on the sides, but I am happy with it plus you can fit a full 36+ roll of slides in two slide pages on it. Or more realistically in my case, I can have one side stacked with slide pages and use the other for viewing. BTW the two stores I mentioned are my film buying stores. Geoff - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
