For those of you who have been involved in either modeling or slide collecting (transparencies), the name Aero Research is a familiar one. Over the years they have been a steady source of interesting aircraft slides at what was the most reasonable price around. I purchased from them often until I stopped slide collecting in the late 1990s to concentrate on Modeling Madness.

What this CD has on it are Navy F-4 images taken from the Aero Research files. As they bought literally tens of thousands of slides to sell, I'm sure they kept at least one of each. The result is quite a base of images.

This particular CD has 152 images of Navy Phantoms from most of the units with which it flew. The images are large;  with the size of around 6000 pixels across. There is no auto-start and what you do is open it in your favorite imaging program. I have several of these programs and had no trouble with the CD in any of them.

Basically this is a colors and markings effort as there are no close-ups. It seems like most if not all of the Navy Fleet and Training squadrons are covered starting with VF-11 and going to VF-213. The quality of the images range from excellent on down to a few that I'd have thought twice about including. Some are obviously dupes, some are fuzzy, the majority are good, and some are superb.

Perhaps I'm being a bit overly critical as this is their first compilation. If so, well, I've been photographing planes for decades and have been dealing with reproducing images for this website, so it is a case of 'the more you know about something, the more that becomes apparent'.

In truth, this is a fine compilation of Navy Phantom images. For someone who wants a ready reference for model work or just likes pictures of F-4s, it is a nice selection of eye candy and quite reasonably priced as well. Other subjects will be available as time progresses. As a final note, I find it interesting that the cover image seems to have been censored!

You can get more information by e-mailing AeroResearch@Charter.net as they have not yet established a web site. Thanks to Aero Research for the review CD.

October 2006

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