British Vintage Stereoscopy — Viewer
SIGHTSEER
A catalogue entry from the collection
| Name | Sightseer |
| Manufacturer | A.P.I. Ltd |
| Date Period | Early 1950s |
| Materials | Plastic, glass, metal |
| Format | 35mm B/W roll film |
Sightseer viewers and box.
Both types of film roll packaging
Sightseer is one of the rarer and more mysterious British formats with very little information available. We don’t know the year it was first sold, how long for, or very much at all about the manufacturer! So let’s see what we do know...
Sold in the early 1950s - or around the same time as the more often seen True-View viewer - would seem to be a sensible guess. There are film rolls for the Festival of Britain which ran from May to September 1951, so we know it was sold around that time. The films and viewer were made by the Visual Aids Division of A.P.I. Ltd. I looked into that name and the only relevant company name I could track down was an insolvent “API Group” in the north west of England, who prior to 1990 were known as Associated Paper Industries PLC but who had been around as a limited company since 1920 (the PLC designation came in after the 1980 Companies Act in the UK; before that - companies used “Limited” or “Ltd” in their name).
This doesn’t definitively identify the mysterious Sightseer-making A.P.I. Ltd as “Associated Paper Industries Ltd” but is perhaps as close as we can get at the present time. I've also found that the Sterolist 35mm "stereo realist" format viewer (to be featured on the site at some point) was also made by A.P.I - although in their case, it was "A.P.I. Ltd, London W1"! So the plot thickens... If anyone out there can provide more information please get in touch!
Sightseer was a 35mm black and white film roll stereoscopy format, similar to True-View, and was distributed by Photax (London) Ltd - a manufacturer and distributor of general photographic equipment. There was one design viewer which was made in various colour combinations. While “patent applied for” appears on every viewer, I’ve never seen a photo of a viewer with any actual patent details on it. The viewer was sold for 18/6 (92.5 pence in today's UK money) complete with 2 film rolls; additional rolls were 2/6d each - 12.5p.
The viewer is plastic-bodied and a little larger and heavier than the equivalent True-View. Despite the bare metal lever (I have yet to see a photo of one with this covered), the Sightseer feels better built compared to the True-View. It consisted of 2 plastic main halves, each in different colours held together by 4 screws - which makes it relatively simple to clean and maintain the viewer. Mine arrived completely seized up, but I was able to unscrew it, add some lubricant to the lever and spring, and get it working again easily. The lenses appear to be glass.
I've seen 2 tone green, grey and maroon, and finally brown and grey viewers - the green ones seem to be the most common. The film rolls were first sold in small metal film canisters - which look very cool and "premium product" - but probably got replaced fairly quickly as being too expensive; most I have seen come in cardboard boxes (similar to True-View and Tru-Vue). Sightseer rolls are rare enough - finding them in the film canisters especially so. Please do let me know if you have any!
The film was threaded into a slot in 1 side of the viewer and the user would then advance the film through the viewer by pulling on the bare metal lever underneath. Despite the similarities to the True-View viewer, they were not compatible - Sightseer images were 4 perforations wide (the same specification as the much earlier American Novelview system) - and narrower than the 5-perforation format used by True-View. Oddly enough though, if you have an American Tru-Vue viewer, Sightseer rolls will fit in those. But this compatibility is one way - Tru-Vue rolls don’t fit in the Sightseer viewer (I know, I tried).
I suspect the more fiddly and laborious process to advance views through the viewer (compared to the more user friendly View-Master from Sawyers) probably contributed to the early demise of TrueView and Sightseer - but you did at least get more views. View-Master was limited to 7 colour stereo shots on a reel, Sightseer featured 16 captioned stereo images (so 32 photo frames in total) plus a title frame, of course - albeit in black and white. Ultimately though, it was a system that dated back to several 1930s American viewers and was probably seen as rather old fashioned, even in the early 1950s.
I have found 66 films known to have been issued so far, focusing on mainly British subjects: towns and cities, transportation, coastal resorts etc. Some online sources have previously suggested over 200 rolls were produced but I think that’s more an assumption based on the numbering system used to identify each film roll. For your information, a list of all titles I’ve noted as existing so far can be found HERE.
Further Reading & Web Links
Image Sets To View (More to be added over time)
- Series 01 - Westminster 1
- Series 124 - Channel Cruise
- Many more coming soon
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