The Database · maker-sourced, one door still shut
The Rail
11 makers · 11 read from their own sites · 1 declined
Somewhere behind a restaurant, an animal with excellent hands is holding a camera worth more than the restaurant's dishwasher, photographing a beetle at five times life size. He has been at it for forty minutes. The beetle left after four. What he is actually photographing is ninety separate slices of a beetle-shaped volume of air, and the reason he can do that at all is a motorised rail nobody mentioned when they sold him the lens.
Why this page exists
The lens ledger lists 14 lenses at or beyond life size, one of them running to 10x with a working distance under an inch. At that magnification the focus ring is not a focusing method — you move the entire camera — and one frame captures almost nothing in focus. Stacking is not a style; it is the only way the lens produces a picture. The ledger had been recommending the glass and omitting the machine.
The $1,200 question nobody asks
The Cognisys StackShot 3X is the three-axis controller everyone names. Its price is widely given as $2,079. That is the Deluxe Kit — two rotary tables, a pan-tilt bracket set, two spare motor cables and a 6 amp supply, which is equipment for 360° virtual objects and gigapixel panoramas.
The rail package alone is $879.00. Quoting the kit price overstates the entry cost by $1,200 — more than an entire WeMacro rail, controller and cable included.
The prices are not comparable, and nobody says so
Five makers, three different definitions of “the price of a rail”. A shopper lining these up in a spreadsheet is comparing a system against a component.
| Maker | Sticker | What that actually buys |
|---|---|---|
| WeMacro | $329–339 | Rail, controller and cable. Complete. |
| Cognisys StackShot | $639 | Controller, rail, motor cable, PSU. Shutter cable +$29. |
| Cognisys 3X | $879 | Same, three-axis controller. Not $2,079. |
| MJKZZ Qool Rail | $241 | Rail only. Add $99 or $175 for a controller — so $340–416. |
| StackMaster | €408–425 | Rail only. Controller is €283.60 or €749.70 more. |
Every rail, every column
9 rows across 6 makers. One row per purchasable travel length — Cognisys sells 100 mm and 200 mm as separate SKUs at separate prices, so they are separate rows. A single row reading “100/200” with one price beside it is the shape that lets a reader think the longer one is free.
| Rail | Travel | Step | Steps per DoF* | Automation | Step count | Delay | Shots/step | Return | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WeMacro Rail | 100 mm | 1 µm | 18 | Own controller · USB-B to PC · Bluetooth phone app | You set start, step size and count, or store start and end and let it divide. | Not stated on the maker's pages. | Not stated. | Yes: the app returns to start. | $339 controller in |
| Cognisys StackShot (100 mm) A 200 mm rail is a separate SKU (see the next row), not a free option. | 100 mm | 2 µm | 9 | Own controller · USB to PC | Auto-Dist, Total Distance, Manual Step, Distance Per Step: five modes. | Configurable settle time. | Multiple photos per step, for bracketing or mirror lock-up. | Configurable auto-return. | $639 controller in |
| Cognisys StackShot (200 mm extended) This IS the extension, priced as its own rail at $439 (rail only). | 200 mm | 2 µm | 9 | Own controller · USB to PC | Same five modes. | Same controller, same settings. | Same. | Same. | $439 rail only |
| Cognisys StackShot 3X 200 mm rail available; rotary tables and pan-tilt are the Deluxe Kit at $2,079. | 100 mm | 2 µm | 9 | Touchscreen controller · USB to PC · Wi-Fi | Five modes, plus time-lapse. | Configurable settle time, plus adjustable motor torque and rail speed. | Multiple photos per step. | Configurable auto-return. | $879 controller in |
| MJKZZ Qool Rail 250 | 170 mm | 0.3125 µm | 59 | Controller sold separately · Wi-Fi and USB on the 3-axis controller | Manual start + step + count, or stored start/end divided by step. | Not stated. | Not stated. | Automatic return to start. | $241 rail only |
| StackMaster Studio | 95 mm | 0.1 µm | 185 | Controller sold separately (S1 or R1) · Wi-Fi on the R1 | Manual start + step size + count with a Stop button, or stored start and end. | Not stated. | Not stated. | Automatic return to start. | €424.76 rail only |
| StackMaster Revolution | 115 mm | 0.1 µm | 185 | Controller sold separately (S1 or R1) · Wi-Fi on the R1 | Same two modes as the Studio. | Not stated. | Not stated. | Automatic return to start. | €408.8 rail only |
| Novoflex CASTEL-MICRO | 100 mm | 0.2 µm | 92 | Own controller · Ethernet cable in the box | STEP and PICTURE modes COMPUTE the number of shots (or the step size) from magnification and aperture. The only rail here that asks what you are photographing. | Wait interval between exposures, for DSLR mirror-up. | Not stated. | Not stated. | €2,099.01 controller in |
| Zaber X-LSM linear stage | 10 mm | 0.01 µm | 1,848 | Own controller · USB | Driven by your own code. No stacking concept. | Move-and-settle under 15 ms. | n/a: not a camera product. | n/a | $4,505 controller in |
*Steps per depth of field, at 10x, is ours — no maker states it. It is how many slices the rail can place inside the sharp zone. Anything above 1 is fine enough, and every rail here clears it easily: at 10x the depth of field is about 18 µm and the coarsest rail on this page moves in 2 µm. Step size is not the thing separating these products, which is the opposite of how they are sold. Computed at c = 15 µm and f/5.6. c = 15 µm is a conventional APS-C figure and N = f/5.6 a typical working aperture for stacking. Both are OURS, not any maker's. Change either and the column moves, which is the point of stating them rather than printing a number that looks measured. 10x is the reference because it is the top of the range this ledger's own lenses reach.
“Not stated” means the maker does not publish it. It is not a missing feature — several of these controllers plainly have a settle delay and simply never say so in print. 4 of 9 rows are a rail with no controller at the price shown.
Which software drives what
The shutter is fired by a dumb cable, which no camera brand can refuse. The compatibility question lives in the software, and the two programs answer it in opposite ways. Cognisys — who make the rail and sell to users of both — state it plainly:
“Helicon will take control over both the camera and the StackShot Rail. There is no direct link between the StackShot controller and the camera.” Zerene “sends a USB command to StackShot to assert the shutter output… This method has the advantage of being compatible with many more cameras, but has the disadvantage of requiring a shutter interface cable.”
Four makers now say the same thing independently — Zerene about itself, Cognisys about both, Pictomic about its own software, StackMaster about its controller. It is the closest thing to a settled fact on this page.
Two things the tidy version leaves out. Zerene's rail control is a paid tier — Personal and Student lose it after thirty days, so the brand-agnostic path costs the rail plus $189. And for Cognisys specifically the vendor's camera list already names thirteen Fujifilm bodies including the X-T5 and X-H2, so there is nothing to reason around: it says yes.
8 of 18 starting claims were wrong
This page began as a research note written from memory. 7 of its claims survived contact with the makers' own pages; these did not.
- WRONG for current units WeMacro: shutter is a 2.5mm cable
- OVERTURNED WeMacro: stepping precision is not stated on its product page
- PRICE CONFIRMED MJKZZ from ~$241; their cable list names only old FinePix bodies
- SUPERSEDED by the maker's own price: €2 Novoflex Castel-Micro ~$3,000
- NOT SUPPORTED Novoflex Castel-Micro: LP-E6 power
- UNSTATED Novoflex: no Zerene integration
- TRUE FOR MJKZZ Implicit in the note: a buyer must reason around vendor camera lists because they do not cover Fujifilm.
- NOT COMPARABLE Implicit in the note: $241 / $639 / $879 are comparable system prices.
The one door still shut
Helicon Soft declines us: their robots.txt names ClaudeBot directly, sets
Content-Signal: ai-train=no and files a copyright
reservation under Article 4 of the EU DSM directive. So the half of this page
that concerns Helicon's camera support is not verified,
and nothing has been written from a search result to fill the hole. Cognisys
corroborates Helicon's architecture and explicitly defers the camera list to
Helicon's own site — which is exactly where we may not go.