In article , RJH
wrote:


The left hand 'Armstrong' lettering on mine is illuminated - can't quite
tell on yours, it looks to be painted, the same as the logo.

It is illuminated, but may not show up clearly. Limitations of my skill
sic as a photographer. cf below.

I think those are good photos by the way - reminiscent of a 70s brochure!

Inc. our 1970s furniture. 8-]

I was trying to get images that approach the ones in the old 600 range
publicity shots, etc. The process gave me a *lot* of respect for the
photographers back then! I'm a lousy photographer, alas.

A snag was that my camera is very 'automatic' so gives you *no* option to
manually focus. At low light levels it tends not to focus well. So I have
to take many shots, then some are fuzzy, some are better. Fortunately,
digital cameras mean it is cheap and easy to take lots of photos, then
discard most of them.

I spend about two days experimenting with lighting conditions, etc, to try
and get photos that appeared as close to "what you see" as possible. The
main difficulty was getting the light level 'just right' so you can see the
tuning scale illumination without the rest of the scene being too dark.

A second problem was reflections in the glass of the tuning display. I
ended up with a black jersey over the back of the chair to which I'd fixed
the camera. This blacked out the area being reflected.

The stereo LED is also 'burned out' in the photos. i.e. it looks like a
small white light surrounded by red. But to the human eye is is just bright
red, however it saturates the camera.

BTW one of the pix showing the whole 626 is actually two joined photos.
That allowed me to zoom in and get more detail to start with. Then played
with GIMP to fiddle the results together. If you look you can see the join,
but it seems minor enough to pass muster.

The zoomed in pic of the tuning scale, etc, is one of the paired images.
Didn't put the other on the page, but can do if it seems worthwhile.

One trick which was suggested to me was to take one photo with no added
light, so only the lighting of the 626 itself would show. Then take another
with reasonably high lighting to make the set sharp and clear. Then
'PhotoShop' (GIMP in my case) the tuning scale and meters from the first
over the second. Apparently the magazines do this routinely. But I found
when I tried it the result looked obviously like a composite. So seemed
un-natural, and might make people think I'd "fiddled the images" to make
the unit look better than it really now is.

The truth is that it looks better than the photos I could take! And sadly
you can't hear what it sounds like from the photos... I'm currently
listening to a string quartet on R3 FM via 626 + LS3/5A's. Really nice. :-)

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html