Strange 3 Lens Camera by J Lizars need help to identify.

[Alex_5228]

I met someone today with a Wooden Box like Camera made by J Lizars Challenge Glasgow, London With 3 brass lenses (1 centrally placed on top 2 on the bottom) looks like it might have a 1/2 plate back, but when you removed the back each lens had its own box like compartment one with red filter one with green filter and one with blue filter, which would have given 3 smaller images on the one sheet of film, exposed through the red green and blue filters.

Anyone any ideas what type of camera it might be ?

[Drew Wiley]

It's obviously a tricolor camera, using three individual pieces of black and white film, each simultaneously exposed through a different color filter. It possibly predates the routine use of tricolor separations for actual color printing. But the resultant negatives could be contact printed to produce black and white positives, which were then used in three separate latern slide projectors, each with its own deep color filter in front of the lens, and all carefully aligned to the same projection screen. The result could be a stunningly accurate color slide show. But I don't know the actual vintage of this camera. Panchromatic plates would obviously have to be in existence. The alternate use would be generating separation negatives for printing press color reproductions. Tricolor camera continued
to be made through the 1940's I believe, although the pinnacle of this technology was the Technicolor process, with synchronized tricolor movie cameras. A few
people still refurbish and use these kind of cameras, though the Curtis and Devin types developed later used pellicles or beam-splitters rather than three separate lenses.

[Alex_5228]

Thanks Drew

I was wondering if the processed negatives were put back into the camera and light from behind might it have been possible to use it as a colour projector as well as a camera?

[Bob Salomon]

The color TV from CBS used a spinning three color filter wheel in front of the screen to try to compete with the color TV from RCA.
But then Leaf used one to produce color scans on their original scan back.

[Drew Wiley]

The camera itself would not have made a suitable projection device. They had to use very hot, bright carbon arc lights back then. And the deep-colored glass filters
over the projected image introduced far more density than the colors in a modern slide film. The poor camera probably would have caught on fire if they used it!

[Drew Wiley]

Bob - those Epolux rotating wheel systems that Sinar briefly sold for sequential (not simultaneous) digital tricolor photography turn up from time to time. Seems they'd be handy for some experimenter. I imagine that most of them ended up in landfill rather than re-sold. Similar automatated devices are made for optical bench research systems. I exhuasted my own tri-color adrenaline building two sequential additive enlargers. The electronics were a pain in the butt.

[Bob Salomon]

Bob - those Epolux rotating wheel systems that Sinar briefly sold for sequential (not simultaneous) digital tricolor photography turn up from time to time. Seems they'd be handy for some experimenter. I imagine that most of them ended up in landfill rather than re-sold. Similar automatated devices are made for optical bench research systems. I exhuasted my own tri-color adrenaline building two sequential additive enlargers. The electronics were a pain in the butt.

The Philips enlarger was an additive color model. But dodging and burning was a challenge!