Natural Science Forum / Physics / Optics / September 2006

Check out www.edmundoptical.com.  They have a variety of adapters.

Which Leitz do you have?  Jim Averill at Bunton Instruments in Mt. Airy, MD
is a Leitz specialist that has fabricated adapters for 38mm diameter port
Leitz heads from surplus Orthomat phototubes.  The beauty of this solution
is that you get Leitz-quality mechanical and optical components that
perfectly fit Leitz trinocular heads, and that render your camera's film (or
sensor) plane parfocal with the oculars.  He has a machinist at his disposal
that can presumably affix a C-mount on the camera end to meet your
requirements.  He makes them in zoom or fixed magnification versions.  I
have one for my Orthoplan to connect a Leica SLR via a T-mount-style bayonet
and it's very robust and works perfectly.
Jim

The typical trinoc photo port is focal.  You can't use a snapshot camera on
that without optics in the adapter; a purely mechanical adapter is not
enough.  A digital SLR minus the lens is more appropriate.

You can read about my varied experiences here:

 http://www.truetex.com/micad.htm

Try Martin Micrscope page (www.martinmicroscope.com).  I have a customer
that uses this unit and it works well.

Kevin Cunningham
SMS

A C-mount camera without an objective and a Nikon Coolpix with objective
must be connected completely differently. For the Coolpix, you need a good
eyepiece. I use the Periplan 10x/18 (part 519748), which must be attached
with care since it has a small, elevated border. It works well with my 990
and 995. The other part you need is not expensive and usually comes with the
trinoc tube. It fits the ISO port and provides a standard tube for oculars.
The cheapest one sold for around $10 on eBay.

To connect a C-mount type camera (without a camera objective) to a Leitz is
expensive and rather involved. First you need a compensating relay lens if
you are using FL and APO lenses and require very good results (see the
hundreds of posts published in this news group about this topic). Then you
need the adapters for the ISO port (usually two parts) to correctly project
the image onto the image sensor. Surveillance cameras usually have
pathetically small CCD's and you need to get an Olympus 1.67x NFK photo
eyepiece to get enough of the field of view projected onto the image sensor.
But this one is difficult to get and rather expensive. If you go without
compensating relay lens, you may be ok. But the quality of the image will
suffer when using FL and APO lenses. In this case, you could just capture
the intermediate image by projecting it directly (without a relay lens) onto
the image sensor. This approach is cheap and simple to implement. Just get a
lens-less adapter for an ISO port that provides a 1x C-mount adapter (for
example see Diagnostic Instruments at http://www.diaginc.com/couplerguide/).

Gregor