The wood­en trays con­tain 25 slides each and can be insert­ed into the view­er by flip­ping back its top. Then, by turn­ing a crank on the right side of the hous­ing, one slide after anoth­er can be exam­ined. Each half-turn of the crank advances or returns the slides and moves the tray for­ward. A met­al lever inte­grat­ed into the counter on the left side of the view­er enables free slide nav­i­ga­tion. A fold-out mir­ror at the back adjusts light for opti­mal image illumination.
The view­er illus­trat­ed has a beau­ti­ful­ly dec­o­rat­ed base which seems to be orig­i­nal but still can’t be found in the cat­a­logues. Prob­a­bly, it was made to order. As there is no stor­age base in ‘Série III’ this view­er only comes with one orig­i­nal tray, which is the Autochrome ver­sion with 12 thick­er slots. It’s still equipped with its 12 Autochrome colour slides in the rare 10x15cm format.
‘Hemdé’ view­ers are among the rar­er tray-stere­o­scopes, and are tes­ti­monies to the remark­able diver­si­ty of French stereoscopes.

Fur­ther read­ing: Stere­oscopy His­to­ry Series — Hemdé (A. Ruiter)