Hello everyone.
Some of you recently had the opportunity of seeing and using our loupes during the presentation of Peter Speake-Marin's wonderful watches. What you may not know, is that I am a long-standing watch collector and watch-forum moderator myself, and that there is a bit of a story behind the creation of our loupes...
In fact, Loupe System was born out of my personal quest to find a very high quality portable loupe to use to admire my own watch collection, as well as the watches which I was being shown in stores and watch fairs.
Most loupes, such as the ones you may have been given by watch brands before, just use a single optical element to provide magnification. While these loupes are often pretty and very light, they provide a good image only in the center of the viewing field: along the edges, you will inevitably see both chromatic aberration (i.e. diffraction, or color shift) and image distortion (i.e. the image becoming unfocused and/or straight lines appearing significantly curved).
These effects can be corrected in part by using additional optical elements in the loupe’s design. Some loupes, called “doublets”, aim to correct the chromatic aberration by using two optical elements glued together. These are made of two different types of glass, shaped so that the chromatic aberration of one is counterbalanced by that of the other. While this improves things, it still leaves significant image distortion at the edges of the viewing field. This is why other loupes, in this case called “triplets”, add a third optical element to this design to attempt to correct the distortion as well.
However, even the very best of them are rarely perfect (e.g. the Carl Zeiss Triotar T* Loupe 5X, once made by Contax with Zeiss optics to examine 35mm slides - which one day I was *finally* able to buy, only to find out that it was not as good as the ones I had made - what a disappointment!!!), and will always show at least some amount of optical aberration at the edges of the viewing field.
Not surprisingly, certain types of camera optics, if designed with the right focusing distance and optical layout, can also function as loupes. This is how, when I finally realized that I was unable to find a loupe which would meet my high standards, I ended up making our own!
I used a professional optical system for a camera from the early '80s, which was made of five optical elements arranged in three groups. You may think of it as a standard loupe with two doublets mounted above and below it, which are specifically designed to correct the image enlarged by the central element. Once modified, that optical system provided me with a clear 40mm-wide viewing field with 6x magnification, free from most chromatic aberration and image distortion.
Some of my friends saw this loupe during the various Basel and SIHH shows I attended with it, and kept asking me to make one for them as well. So eventually I ended up scouring eBay to find some more of those camera optics, and modifying them on my kitchen table to make a few more loupes, which I took with me to the Basel watch fair in '12. Much to my surprise, in a matter of hours, they were all sold out to people like Philippe Dufour, Laurent Ferrier, Romain Gauthier, Bart & Tim Grönefeld, Stepan Sarpaneva, Roger Smith, Andreas Strehler, Kari Voutilainen and so on!!!
This is how those first 32 hand-made loupes which I sold that day became the inspiration for the development of our current Model 01 loupe...
Glad to answer any questions you might have!
Alberto
