For whatever it's worth, I've just now had a chance to play a bit with Google's "Bard" chatbot. Compared with ChatGPT, it seems primitive. It does, however, attempt to provide references, but these resemble the results of a poorly-done Web search. Google clearly has a lot of catching up to do. Meanw...

Thanks, gents--this is an excellent start.

To my mind--knowing nothing about Olympus optics--the more specific and complete, the better.

--Chris S.

Nice work, Klaus--especially with simple equipment.

Welcome!

Scarodactyl wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 22, 2023 10:18 pm

There are only a few olympus infinity objectives that had eyepiece corrections, splans and dplans. They also have different styling from later uis/uis-2 objectives.

So--could you perhaps write a FAQ?

Thanks, Pau, for mentioning the very good Olympus objectives. I often forget to include them in discussions. I have no experience with them, and don't grasp which Olympus objectives work without corrective optics, and which ones do not. I've learned much of Nikon and Mitutoyo brands' alphabet soups,...

My bet is that false references are a product of how LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT work--and don't work. They have "read" a great volume of material, and use this to predict what words should go next. They are somewhat like giant word clouds in multiple dimensions, with weightings. They ...

Smugles, Too bad there is no Nikon CF Plan WD 10.4! This objective (or something very close to it) does exist. See page 14 of this 1989 Nikon brochure , under Plan Achromat>Long-Working-Distance/Dry> CF Plan N Plan Achromat ELWD 20 X. You will find a 20x objective with a numerical aperture of 0.4 an...

. . . you can ask RafCamera to make you a replacement rear mount. He made those for the Minolta Auto Bellows III, so most likely he can make one for yours as well. This is good advice. With a replacement rear mount, it will be as if the Nikon bellows were originally made for your Sony camera (and I...

I use a Nikon PB-6 bellows with various accessories from the PB-6 ecosystem. This was a well-thought-out bellows system, and some of the accessories make the bellows especially useful. If you can live with what Lou aptly terms "irreducible extension" imparted by adapters to Sony, I'd give this syste...

Carlos, welcome to the forum!

I like your photographic work. Thanks for sharing!

Those old Nikkor "micro" lenses continue to perform well, don't they? You might also like one of the 105mm micro-Nikkors, some of which have gotten ridiculously cheap on the used market.

--Chris S.

Before we discovered Mitutoyo 20x/0.42 objectives, the go-to lens for 20x was the Nikon CF 20x/0.4 ELWD 210/0 objective. This was, and still is, quite a good lens. It has 10.5mm working distance. I see the BD version of this lens on eBay for $250. Item number is 203514239781. A few notes on this len...

UncleChip, thanks for the additional picture and info on your z-axis. I agree with Darionett--it's ingenious. For the z-axis of a macro rig, it's challenging to achieve long travel that is also precise--especially without blocking light in varied illumination setups. You've accomplished all this, an...

Nice! We don't have many documentations here of motorized Z-axis stages.

What exact item did you start with as your Z-stage?

In your images, I haven't figured out where the Z-stage motor is shown. Surely I'm just tired and missing it--but can you kindly point it out?

Cheers,

--Chris S.

Bad news: I was unable to recover a draft version of my long post by looking at Web browser history. Oh well, it was worth a try. Thanks to everyone for the suggestion! Sorry to hear this, but not surprised. Having lost a post or three myself, I now usually compose long posts in Microsoft Word, the...

Having played with ChatGPT over past weeks, and doing so again just now in ways that relate to the new posts in this thread, I think we are indeed on the edge of an abyss. Perhaps we need to harden the registration process a bit more. Though doing so without making it overly cumbersome for real peop...