DUKANE Micromatic II filmstrip projector

[myrealghostbusters]

how much would you say those things cost back then? i remember either a teacher or a student had to be the one to turn the film when you heard the beep.

[HappyDiscoDeath]

cool! I saw one of these once in my sophmore history class, and was much more interested in the projector (an antique automatically cycling the filmstrip with each audible boooop) than the educational content! :D I'm looking around for a Micromatic to go with my 500.

[lssuitguy]

would you like to sell me the projector.....i still have the filmstrips for it

[Scott88Cyndi]

@lssuitguy I have one of these I am trying to sell if you are interested?

dtbd88@yahoo.com

[roger62383]

OH WOOOOOOOOOOOW!!! My 3rd Grade teacher used to load cartoon slides in one of these and pick a student in the class to change the slide every time the cassette would made the beep sound. How times have changed.

Thanks for posting this.

[manyvideoinerests]

Hey there, long time no talk here, but nice projector. Does anyone have any of those old reel movie projectors? I remember in one high school class a lot of the teacher's materials were on these strips, and was used almost every day.

[joeperryforpope]

i have a DUKANE VP MATIC and it just broke, if anyone knows anything about them, and about fixing them, PLEASE MESSAGE ME!!!

THANKS

[agfamatic91]

i remember that in my school they only had projetors without eny built-in cassette player and they only had manual slide changeing so you had to press a button to make it change slide when they used these the teacher had a separate cassette player to play a tape with the narrator and when it was time to show the next slide it was a bip sound on the tape and the teacher would press the button so that the projetor showd the next slide

[coondogtheman1234]

@agfamatic91

I remember those from elementary school before these built in tape units. occasionally the teacher let one of the kids run the projector. I did get a chance to do it.

[jaydee4539]

I was one of the lucky ones who use to build these units back in the early 90's in St. Charles Illinois

[Lachlant1984]

I'm pretty sure the school I went to in 1993 had one of these.

[fixman88]

I remember those! I was often the lucky one who got to run it!

[rockybabyboy]

I remember this from grade school.

[cliftdean]

i think that extra lens is the condenser lens that goes in directly in front of the lamp before the filmstrip and main lens

[weasel2htm]

Did my video (responce) help matters any? Or have you had a chance to try?

[coondogtheman1234]

I remember these from 7th grade, i thought they were so neat how you just load the tape and filmstrip and then hit play and let it do its thing. If i ever found one of these id try to find some film and id play tapes in it and id even try a cassette adaptor and play my PSP thru it

[Vinylrecordsneverdie]

Hell, not only to should try a cassette adapter to play your PSP thru it, but also try to project the screen onto it somehow.

[coondogtheman1234]

@Vinylrecordsneverdie

that would involve heavy modification to this projector to add a video in and have a video grid in place of the film like an LCD panel that shows the picture. and id replace the light with an LED array. My PSP has a video out but the brightness is too high and I cant lower it. see my "PSP 2001 video problem" video. it would be cool to play GTA Vice City Stories on a projector but I can just do that on my PS2. hook that to that Zoombox thing from hasbro.

[coondogtheman1234]

Replying about your comment about looking at negatives using one of these projectors:

I'd do that too, I have negatives from pics I still have I should tape them together and look at them on one of these projectors.

im replying like this b/c the original comment was posted via your Damusician account.

[damusician]

I should get one of them to view negetives that my mom has in box of photos.

[vwestlife]

I ran the audio through a spectrum analyzer, and your B&H Filmosound is actually producing a 1600 Hz (1.6 kHz) tone when played back on the Dukane, not 1000 Hz, which is probably why it isn't working. Likely there is a speed difference between the two machines.

[retrochad]

Also to make the film advance you will need to rig up an audio oscillator with a momentary switch and mix it in with your audio input. It needs to be on the same track as your audio (as you say it is indeed a single side head)

You will need to do your narration and then pause for a second and place about a 1-second 50hz tone on the tape with nothing else, and then resume your audio program. The frequency response of the speaker/amp is such that it tends to attenuate the 50hz tone.

[CassetteMaster]

Cool! I wish they'd do it on the other side too like slide projectors.

[sr71ablackbird]

@retrochad or, you could do it the old-fashioned way like I used to do when I ran it, just wait for the beep and turn the knob to switch to the next picture...lol....

[retrochad]

I remember these too from school and I also have one like this plus one of the silent-film only models. There was a predecessor model to this Dukane which was kind of a dark beige and came in two models...one was a cassette but the other was a phonograph. In the back was a small turntable that could support a 12" record.

One time in about 2001 organist1982 and I found some 35mm film discarded in a field near a movie theatre and were able to project it in still frames using one of these.

[damusician]

Omg, I haven't seen them in ages! I remember that thing really well including the case.

[billybassman21]

Dude I forgot all about those till I saw this. You just triggered a bunch of memories. The ones we had in school were manual ones.

[vwestlife]

It probably uses a subaudible tone to trigger the slide mechanism. 25 Hz subaudible tones (which actually *are* audible if you have really big speakers which can respond to that frequency) are common in radio station automation; your Dukane may use a 50 Hz tone, as you mention.

[CassetteMaster]

Mine uses 50Hz and 1KHz. But it doesn't seem to trigger (maybe the Bell & Howell's tone isn't the right frequency?)

[coondogtheman1234]

@CassetteMaster

try a cassette adaptor if you can get it to fit in the player and then hook it to your computer and play a few tones on your computer thru it see if it triggers it. im not sure how you can run the wire of the adaptor b/c of the way the cassette door is.

[aldiakaroofus]

I also recall wanting to pull a prank and borrow a cassette at random, bring it home, record nonsense over it and put it back on the shelf! I can't remember if I went through it or not!

[CassetteMaster]

That would have been funny! And you probably would have got in BIG trouble!

[aldiakaroofus]

I haven't forgotten about film strip projectors from my grade school in the 70s, mostly from 1976-77 (grade 3). They must have been older models since the teacher had to crank the film manually by turning a knob near the film entrance. A beep would indicate when to move to the next frame. I think the cassette player was separate from the black projector. I remember the 35mm film strips being stored in several film capsules, on a shelf in the hall close to the classroom's entrance. (more)

[weasel2htm]

I remember in middle school we needed to play tapes for a class party, the Micromatic II was all we had handy, it played the music quite well an surprisingly loud. I have a signal generator at home (I'm out of town right now) I could record some tones for you at 50Hz and 1khz for you to try and e-mail the short wav files which then you could transfer to cassette.

[CassetteMaster]

Thanks!

[spatsbear2]

Aw man, I haven't seen one of those since elementary school (early 90s!)

I recall being obsessed with the one in the library. Every time we'd watch a film strip, I was paying more attention to the projector than the film :p The teacher wouldn't let me near the unit though :p

[damusician]

Hahahaha, you and my both!

[CassetteMaster]

In the 3rd grade, they did use one of these, with the cassette in the library!

[retrochad]

We had a few of the Dukanes in school but would often use Bell and Howell manual filmstrip projectors which were metal and kind of a turquoise color and I loved being able to get to crank the film! Often the filmstrips would be silent and we would go around the room reading teh captions.

[WillWatchAnything]

Dukane filmstrip projectors were in just about every classroom I was at in the early 80s, although the ones we used didn't have the enclosed cassette player. Dukane also made many of the gym scorebaords of that era, my HS had one of them.