Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1996/05/21

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To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Subject: Lens Cleaning Cloth
From: Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net>
Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 09:23:52 -0400
Cc: Tom Hodge <thodge@charweb.org>

At 06:45 AM 5/21/96 -0400, Tom Hodge wrote:
>Eric and LUG'ers,
>
>I stumbled across - and have really flipped over - a specialty cloth 
>called "Luminex" made by a company in Japan called 'Toray" fronting 
>itself as 'world leaders in fiber technology".

Well, Tom, I'm glad that the innovations of 1992 have finally caught up with
you.  These cloths have now been on the market for some years -- the basic
idea was developed, as I recall, by RIT or some similar American school but
no American company would produce them at a reasonable cost, so Luminex got
on the band wagon.  In any event, I got my first one in late '92 when my
local camera store demanded I buy one -- and they were right!  

About eighteen months later, Herbert Keppler at Pop Photo suddenly found out
about them and completely flummoxed the story -- claimed IN PRINT that you
couldn't get them in the US and started to import them, privately, from
Japan at a rather hefty price.  Ah, what a bloody fool he made of himself
(as he has done before and since on other issues, many and many a time.)

These cloths are now produced by quite a few sources and most optical
manufacturers give away or sell these imprinted with their own logo -- the
Leica ones are about $5.25.  Pentax and Canon do the same.  I use the Zeiss
ones, but machts nichts, they're all the same.  They DO work -- so long as
there's no grinding of grit into the lens surface, these really are remarkable.

Marc

msmall@roanoke.infi.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!


Replies: Reply from "joe b." <joe@azurite.demon.co.uk> (Re: Lens Cleaning Cloth)
Reply from Stan Yoder <syoder+@andrew.cmu.edu> (Re: Lens Cleaning Cloth)