Great series of tests, very informative.

I note that in another thread, Rik also tested the Mitutoyo 10X NA 0.28 (working distance 33.5 mm) at 5x

Your side to side stage seems to add a lot of left:right adjustment which might not be that useful - hence the questions :) I assumed this was to produce true (rather than synthetic) stereo pairs? Take one stack, move over a bit, repeat the stack (which the StackShot controller makes very easy). Or...

Excellent photos, made all the more enjoyable by the clearly described and fascinating background information. Thanks so much for taking the time to explain this. Looks like you had a great trip!

If the cost is no great worry, I recommend getting a PB-6 (or possibly a PB-4, which I haven't used but understand to be highly regarded). There is someone close to home selling a PB-4 for 75$, and from what I gather this is an excellent deal. Does anyone have any experience mounting either a D200 ...

But there is more to it than that. The D200 is a somewhat old camera . . . with a CCD sensor. In parallel reasoning, the Nikon N Plan CF Apo 4x 160/0.20 is a somewhat old lens. . .and a finite optic. What of it? This lens is among the best optics, new or old, yet tested at 4-5x. Let's not drink the...

#1. Go with the D700. As I read the specs, the D700 has more total pixels than the D200 (12.1 megapixels vs 10.2), and the larger sensor will capture more light and give you better gradation. Yes, you read the specs correctly (12.1 MPx full frame vs. 10.2 MPx 1.5 crop). But there is more to it than...

rjlittlefield wrote: One approach that I've used on occasion is to combine the original and noise-reduced versions using a hand-drawn mask so that I get to decide what's noise and what isn't.

Noise Ninja has a noise brush, to allow this sort of selective blending of original and noise-reduced images.

Looks like these are uncompressed TIFF. Tiff also supports a couple of lossless compression methods - lzw and gzip - but of course both your TIFF writing software and your TIFF reading software need to support these. PNG is another alternative, which has lossless compression and supports 16 bits per...

For me it is #2, then #3, with #1 and #4 joint third place being smeary and dull. I wondered if was seeing more in #2 just because its a dark area of the subject and is exposed a bit lighter than the others. But it seems crisper with better contrast and definition overall and the colours look cleane...

These Nikkor 200mm primes can be found on ebay for under $50. How well do they work out? http://www.ebay.com/itm/260889079387?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649 That is a Nikkor-Q 200mm f/4 and is (despite the mention of AI in the title) a pre-AI lens whch has (as the auction text m...

This is assuming that the D7000 can handle manual flash with rear-curtain sync mode--that's worth check, as Chris R pointed out. That said, I don't know that rear-curtain sync is a "must have"--I use it because I have it and it can't hurt. Not sure my results would be much different without it. Yes...

While my rail and controllers are in their hands, I have asked Cognisys to consider incorporating a more 'robust' connection for the S-Video cable or an alternative interface. That particular component of the rail/controller combo is a weak link in the chain . I won't go into particular details; bu...

I used to use high quality B&W uv filters 'for protection'. I now use metal lens hoods instead, for this reason. You never know when one of these artifacts is going to show up.

I notice that the forum posting in the original post was not using a hood.

Bummer, I can't see it. Why would Microsoft make anything new that can't run on 64bit? Conversation at a recent technical conference: Chris: I'm running Win764 bit now, very pleased with it. Looked at the IE10 preview... puzzled that IE9 32bit is the default on Win7 64bit, why is that? MS engineer:...