[Leica] Slide dupes...... Well............

["BIRKEY, DUANE" <dbirkey@hcjb.org.ec>]

Unless you are going to do a lot of dupes, I probably would follow Ted's 
recommendation and have a good lab do the work. 

I do thousands of dupes for slide presentations each year using a Durst 
ChromaPro and Fuji CDUII dupe film.    That's basically about a $1000 
machine not including a lens.  Add to that $40 for a 100 ft. roll of dupe 
film plus developing and mounting and numerous tests to get the color 
balance and exposure right .  So IMHO, it's a pretty expensive 
proposition for 50 or a 100 slides especially if your results are only 
equal or worse.   You can get Beselar  unit like Tina's or a Bowen's unit 
as well but I I'd recommend one with dichroic filters for color 
correction.

To complicate matters, CDU II dupe is really sensitive to processing and 
chemistry variations, much more so than normal slide film.  You may be 
rather frustrated by the results when in reality, the problem could very 
well be caused by your lab.  I do all of processing in-house with a JOBO.

When duping slides you need to know that dupe film reacts with color 
balance changes based upon exposure and sometimes subject matter and it 
takes experience to know how much to correct.  Once you know how to do it 
though, you can rescue and improve many slides, especially those taken by 
amateurs.  There are some films (like Seattle film works) that require 
huge amounts of corrections to duplicate.  (I charge extra for those)

Some labs will not correct for exposure or color balance so you might 
want to find one that does.

You can make dupes with your camera set up using a piece of diffusion 
material behind the slide by 4 inches or so and regular film, but........ 
you gain a lot of usually unwanted contrast, especially with Leica glass. 
 It might be fun to try..... but I wouldn't get your hopes up too much 
and I wouldn't invest much currency in it..

Duane Birkey

HCJB World Radio
Quito Ecuador