The Vintage 3D Viewer collection visually highlights the beauty and creativity of stereoscope design.
Check out our latest vintage 3D updates …
There’s a bit of everything: reel, slide, card, and filmstrip viewers. While a couple are from the early 20th century, this is mostly a mid-century group, including some top ones from our wishlist.
In this final “reveal”, we share all the Tru-Vue sales and advertising ephemera hiding in our Tru-Vue collection. Well, maybe not all, but most of it!
We underestimated this little 10-stereoview set! And we love resurfacing a good stereoscopic mystery, especially one involving Universal Pictures, Lon Chaney, and a possible Alfred Krauth connection.
In Part 2, we share history and highlights from our Tru-Vue filmstrip and card collection, including rare, early filmstrips, film box variations, and hard-to-find commercial cards.
This month’s stereoview spotlight takes a look at life and leisure in early 1900s Cincinnati, courtesy of the Whiting brothers.
New viewers, new viewer colors and a very rare roll of stereoviews. Take a look at what’s come in over the past few months.
This month’s stereoview spotlight features a creative, reflective way to get family members into a photo.
It’s an Omnium-fest here at Vintage 3D Viewers! Three beautiful wood & nickel Omnium stereoscopes have joined the collection.
We’re excited to finally offer Part 1 of a curated glimpse into our Tru-Vue sub-collection. You’ll need some time on your hands to absorb it all!
Buried in a 1920s set produced by The Standard Textile Products Co. was one stereoview that took our breath away.
We have no idea how many factories were documented inside Stereo-foto & Pendoplast viewers, but we’re excited to add 6 more factories to our collection of industrial 3D images.
Each of the stereoscopes in our latest update has a cool design feature. From lazy tongs to a 12-slide cartridge to a stereoscope-binocular combo — design creativity abounds!
An amateur (or perhaps famous) stereo photographer takes us traveling through 1931 with a group of his fellow adventurers.
This latest group of additions includes plastic, wood, metal, and cardboard vintage stereoscopes, covers glass, tissue, standard, and miniature card formats, and spans almost 100 years from the 1860s to the 1950s.
We’ve skipped a few months of collection updates but are making up for it with a nice selection of rarities. Most are completely new to our collection while a couple are only new to the website.
These unknown theater children are first up in Stereoview Spotlight, a new series of posts where we highlight interesting stereoviews in our collection.
We have a bunch of wooden handhelds threatening to walk out if we don’t feature them. We’ve also added a couple of rare metal viewers.
We finally found a filmstrip viewer that has eluded us for years! Plus, you may be shocked to learn that three View-Masters made it into our collection in the past 2 months — we certainly were!
With this month’s group of unique stereoscope designs, we’re almost positive there will be at least one you’ve never seen or heard of.
If this group of vintage 3D viewers doesn’t demonstrate the longevity and variety of stereoscope design, we don’t know what does!
All the new additions to our website are from the 1910s-40s. Two are military-related and two are lookalikes.
Explore our sub-collection of vintage anaglyph brochures, promotions, postcards, and more from the 1920s through the 1960s.
In the past two months, we’ve added a couple of true rarities! Moreover, we’ve built up our Corte-Scope sub-collection with two new additions and increased our NPG sub-collection with 15 new additions.
This month’s additions include two fairly standard stereo viewers alongside four that are quite unusual in their design and use.
From shape to format to branding, this month’s vintage stereoscope additions have something unusual to offer on all three fronts.
We welcomed 3 vintage viewers into the fold in May, including one with a very unique design.
We had fewer additions to our website for April, but there are some very cool ones, including two from Unis-France.
We’re sharing some vintage 3D viewers that have us wondering, “Who Dis?” If you have info to help us solve the mysteries, give a holla at a collector!
A Focus on Stereoscope Design
Stereoscopes from the late 1800s were often works of art themselves — exhibited at fairs, appealing to royalty, and fit to be a centerpiece of the home. Toward the middle of the 1900s, styles became more varied in their materials to match current design trends, make use of readily available materials, or just better fit the particular use case.
Besides functionality, usability, and affordability, a product’s appearance is often a big selling point. Observing how those factors vary in a single product — a 3D viewer — across centuries is fascinating.
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Browse by Year
Stroll through time with a visual tour of our vintage stereo viewers arranged in 20-year groups.
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Browse by Format
From cards and glass to filmstrips and reels, we’ve grouped our collection by the media they use.
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Browse by Material
We’re all about design — explore the collection by viewer material: wood, cardboard, etc.
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Browse by Use Case
Explore by specific use cases we find interesting, like advertising, autos, postcards or erotica.
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How have car manufacturers used 3D to advertise? We’ve brought together some examples from our collection.