This may be of interest to those of you who, like me, are mainly slide
shooters. I have thousands of slides stored 20 to the page in dozens of
binders of about 40 pages each. I am not a cataloger or record keeper, so more
often than not finding a particular slide is a search and rescue mission.
Heretofore, it's either been a matter of pulling out the pages, which slip and
slide around on one another like greased pigs in a vat of Jello, plopping them
on the light box, then wrestling the squirming things back into the binders.
Or, worse yet, when too lazy for this procedure, getting a crick in the neck by
tilting my head sideways while trying to hold the pages in the binder so that
light from a window or desk lamp might allow me to spot my quarry. This nearly
never works and causes my disposition to deteriorate rapidly.
Then a few weeks ago I discovered the Hakuba Lightviewer 5700 Pro. Pardon me
if everybody here knows about these things and has one, but on the off chance
there's someone else behind the times, I will continue. This little light box
is 9.5 in. x 6 in. x 0.75 in., with a 7 in. x 5 in. viewing area. It runs two
hours on batteries (4 AAs) and comes with an AC adapter. It weighs 1.1 lbs.
with batteries installed. Now when searching for a particular slide, it's
simply a matter of plopping the binder on the desktop or in the lap, slipping
the viewer behind the first page, sliding it from top to bottom while perusing
the slides, then turning the page and repeating the process.
With the anticipated arrival Wednesday of the Minolta 5400 scanner, and heeding
the prediction of Boldbolty (Adam) that I would start digging out old slides to
scan, I got a head start yesterday afternoon. I took a stack of binders and a
refreshing beverage with me when I went to plop my butt in the recliner in
front of the magic picture appliance to watch the Braves complete a three-game
sweep of the Marlins. Between pitches, I searched for slides I might want to
scan. (One of the great things about baseball is that once you become attuned
to the rhythm of the game, you can do all sorts of productive things while
watching and not miss much of anything.)
End of story: During the course of the game, I went through 8 40-page binders,
meaning I looked at over 6000 slides without breaking a sweat or swearing on a
Sunday afternoon, marking a page here and there with a green sticky tab when I
found a candidate for scanning.
Here's a picture of the thing in use this morning. I've got lots more slides
to look at.
http://home.att.net/~hiwayman/wsb/html/view.cgi-photo.html--SiteID-688131.html
Walt
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