What devices have you found useful when inspecting your stylii for cleanliness?

@goofyfoot Spelling forgiven! I am sure it was your spell-checker :-)

I have been getting offers from B&H every week! Took me a while to realise they were once Bell and Howell of movie equipment fame.

It also took me a while to realise that most loupes are used for jewelry or inspecting creepy-crawlies. Australia is not short of jem-stones, or nasty biters. It seemed silly to order from New York so I searched locally.

Because I could not source BelOMO loupes, I have gone upmarket and ordered a Zeiss Optics D4 10X loupe. I could get one in town (Sydney) for a tad over A$340, which is about what my stylus is worth, but I found one on-line for well under half that from China, including our 10% gst. Hope it is the real thing!

This is a nostalgia trip for me, as I am restoring my Dad’s Garrard 301. He lent me the first camera I ever used, which was a Leica film camera with a fixed 50-mm Zeiss lens. He took award winning black and white photos on it, but I could never remember to set all the eight manual controls needed for proper photography. Nothing digital about it, or even electrical. Bit like vinyl, really.

@richardbrand Yes, hopefully that Zeiss Loupe from China is either real or a really good fake. I have a T* Zeiss monocular and it’s as clear as you could ever hope for. Personally, I gave up 35mm a long time ago. I now use a Toyo 45 A 4X5 field camera that is of course totally manual. I have Schneider lenses and for the exposure reading, I use a Pentax Zone 5 spot meter. I’ve gone to shooting Fujichrome transparency and then I send it to CRC in New York for processing and high resolution scanning. I believe some of those Leica digital cameras cost about what a Hasselblad digital back would cost. Anyway, I think we got off the topic of audio but if that Leica loupe isn’t helpful, you could spend even more money on a large format camera and use it against the glass view finder.

@goofyfoot 

There's a Leica shop in Sydney full of very exxe film cameras.  A mate of mine was trained as a police forensic photographer and he was often asked what is the best camera?  "Mate, it is the one you have in your hand when you want to take a photo"!

These days it is usually my phone ...which I suppose is like ear buds versus HiFi

@goofyfoot My Zeiss D40 loupe arrived from China.  I thought the package was empty, because the loupe is so small and light!  Might have to buy a bigger loupe in case I mislay the Zeis and need to find it!

It would have to be the highest dollars-per-gram lens purchase I have ever made, but it is seriously good, especially when used as directed in a 30-mm gap between the eye and the object.  Works almost as well when it is close to the object and the eye is almost at infinity.

I see you also have big Quad electrostatics!

Yeah, there's not much to those lupes and they're costly. I use a pair of binoculars on my field camera. It turns everything right side up, which I prefer, so I've never owned a high quality lupe like the Zeiss. 

I have the Quad 2905's but with the 2912 panels, so I just tell people I have the 2912's. They're great with my ASR Emitter 2 Exclusive amp. I got lucky when I paired those two together.