Several years ago I had a chance to try out an Olympus endoscope/modelscope with an adapted SLR Olympus. The cost at the time was a bit prohibitive to invest in what turned out to be a system which was quite hit and miss with focus .. and had to be held by tripod for any kind of depth of field.
Recently I was thinking again about offering an "eye level" model photography service and thought that a micro camera could do the same job ... if I could manage to hold a lens .. say 4mm off the surface of a model (difficult I know even with the modelscope) .. then it could be used with 1:500 models and up. Does anyone have any experience with good systems in this area? .. It would need to have a say 3mp chip at least and have a pretty wide angle view. I would have no prob with the cost of the modelscope now except I think a micro lens would be more versatile.
Thanks for your attention!
Ros
www.roskavanagh.com
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=86549\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Hello Ros,
Back in the early '70's, I also used a modelscope (of unknown origin), maybe Olympus? Ours was a stainless steel shaft with a prism fitted in a tiny aperature at the approx eye level of a person at 1/4" scale. At the "top" of the shaft was a disc attached for mounting the assembly to a 49mm filter threaded lens. I believe that we used a T-mount and step-down filter adapters when using a 35mm SLR film camera with it. It was also stored in a padded velvet lined hardwood presentation box and kept in the Dean's office. Obviously, it was not inexpensive, though I never really thought about that at the time.
Most of the time, it was used just to view the enclosed space created within an architectural model to give us students a more realistic way of experiencing our designs. It was a really cool gadget.
I did a little research earlier this year into locating one of these tools after so long a time, but found nothing but dead ends to every website lead that I discovered. I did notice that some university architectural schools still have these available for checkout by the students, surprising as I seem to recall that ours was stolen, and this was so many years ago at the University of Arizona. So there must be a very recent source, given that these things were somewhat fragile, and "desirable".
My indications are that the Olympus brand modelscope was discontinued maybe within the last five years or so, though I do not have any first hand info. Maybe a call to Olympus is the best way to go. And/or to some of the many University Dept of Arch. around the country.
Please post an update if you find a source for these.
Joe
