Classic cameras

[Purité Audio]

Pure coincidence coinciding with Gorgonzola’s post!
Keith

 

[mhardy6647]

I'm digressing a bit with this Nizo 481 Super-8 camera, because I like the design by Dieter Rams & the design group at Braun. Although there were another German company selling 35 mm still cameras under the "Braun Nürnberg" name, that company seems to have been unaffiliated with Braun AG. If the latter ever produced still cameras, I'm not aware of it.
View attachment 185051 View attachment 185055

No harm, no foul -- a friendly amendment.

 

[JeffS7444]

Miranda SLR; note the Exacta-like external lens automation ...
View attachment 184942

I botched a repair attempt on a similar camera back in the 1970s: A buddy scored one at a garage sale but lost interest when he realized that it was too gummed-up to take decent pictures, so he gave it to me. Today, maybe it would be a leisurely one-afternoon job of tidying-up, but back then, I lacked tools, patience and know-how to do a proper job - ouch.

 

[mhardy6647]

"We" do have one Miranda in the collection.
My son & I have kind of a tripartite collection. He has a bunch, I have some, and then there are a few that we both acknowledge as co-owned. Kind of a silver halide collective, if you will.

I picked this one up from someone on a hifi forum at some point with a few lenses and other ephemera.

Miranda DR 1.9

Camera: Miranda DR 1.9 circa 1962 Lens mount: Miranda bayonet (weird, external, four bladed), also has an internal screw mount, but ...

icouldbeahero.blogspot.com

In the US, Miranda cameras and Soligor lenses could be found in some of the... umm... second-tier vendors' catalogs over a span of quite a few years. Lafayette Radio Electronics (LRE), e.g., fairly leaps to mind. Miranda, Yashica, and Kowa cameras and accessories tended to appear more often than other brands in non-camera-specialist catalogs, at least as I remember it.

source: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Lafayette-Catalogs/Lafayette-1970-700.pdf

This 1970 LRE catalog, interestingly, has the SR-T101 in it, too! Minolta was not a common sight in old LRE catalogs, though.

 

[JeffS7444]

I picked this one up from someone on a hifi forum at some point with a few lenses and other ephemera.

Miranda DR 1.9

Camera: Miranda DR 1.9 circa 1962 Lens mount: Miranda bayonet (weird, external, four bladed), also has an internal screw mount, but ...

icouldbeahero.blogspot.com

Now that looks familiar, right down to the film counter with red dot in the center. But I do not recall the metal guard plate, wonder if former owner added that?

 

[JeffS7444]

The start of the "clamshell" craze, the Olympus XA:

A real miniature marvel of the late 1970s, combining a fast 35/2.8 lens, aperture-priority automation and coupled rangefinder focusing! Judging from the number of followup XA-series cameras, a major success, though eventually eclipsed by Olympus's own Stylus aka Mju compacts which upped the ante by adding motorized film transport, built-in flash, and autofocus.

 

[mhardy6647]

Now that looks familiar, right down to the film counter with red dot in the center. But I do not recall the metal guard plate, wonder if former owner added that?

Yes, it was added; Prof. H. mentions that in the little write-up to which I linked

 

[tuga]

My 35mm system was CONTAX, and I've never owned anything which came close

Same here.
I had the 167mt and later the RX, an almost perfect camera. It is still stored away, don't really know why...

 

[JeffS7444]

2015 Camera swap meet, Jefferson County Fairgrounds, Colorado

I recall arriving mid-morning, but some vendors were already starting to pack up for the day. I found a couple of items that interested me, but condition was nothing special, and they didn't seem like particularly good buys, so I left.

 

[JeffS7444]

I read somewhere that in the immediate post-WWII era, Japan had something like 800 camera manufacturers! Some, like Leotax or Nicca seem to have merged with other companies, but so far as I know, the makers of the Shinano Pigeon, Neoca and Samoca cameras simply went the way of the dodo, the latter surviving into the early 1960s.

 

[Gorgonzola]

Dang!! I know I'd forgotten a camera or two from my past and here are a couple ...

Canon ELPHJr ultra compact, a very neat tiny camera the employed the "Advanced Photo System", APS, invented by Kodak and adopted -- for a time -- by several other makers. In case of APS the soon-after arrival of digital cameras, especially the small ones, contributed to APS' demise no doubt.

Olympus Pen F 1/2 frame 35 mm SLR ... got a lot of pics from a single cassette, not bad quality either ...

 

[JeffS7444]

Circa 1965 Haking Halina Paulette Electric (Hong Kong):

These seem to be more common outside of the USA, particularly in markets like the UK. Looks enough like a German Regula that I wonder if it was built from Regula tooling. Built for low cost, it's lightweight and mostly plastic. And yet, coated glass lens looks like a real effort at producing a decent picture-taking machine. Some are marked as "Made in Empire", but this one simply said "Hong Kong".

 

[mhardy6647]

One of the AK stalwarts kindly passed along a trio of Zenit SLR bodies (K-mount) and a couple of lenses, including a nifty little fisheye, to my son quite a few years back. We were able to get one of the bodies to function more or less properly and he (my son, that is) got his first taste of super-wide-angle lenses with it. I think he was still in high school @ the time.

Zenit APk with MC Helios-44K-4 58mm f/2

Camera: Zenit APk circa 1992-1998?! Lens mount: Pentax K-mount (bayonet) Shutter: electronic, 1 - 1/2000s plus bulb. Manual and ap...

icouldbeahero.blogspot.com

MC Zenitar 16mm f/2.8

MC Zenitar 16mm f/2.8 Filter size: 26.5mm x 0.5 (rear mount) Close focus: 0.3 meters Aperture range: f/2.8 - f/22 Depth of field scal...

icouldbeahero.blogspot.com

 

[JJB70]

The start of the "clamshell" craze, the Olympus XA:
View attachment 185234 View attachment 185235
A real miniature marvel of the late 1970s, combining a fast 35/2.8 lens, aperture-priority automation and coupled rangefinder focusing! Judging from the number of followup XA-series cameras, a major success, though eventually eclipsed by Olympus's own Stylus aka Mju compacts which upped the ante by adding motorized film transport, built-in flash, and autofocus.

The Olympus X cameras still have a cult following and nice examples of the original XA especially are quite sought after. They were wonderful cameras.

 

[JeffS7444]

Just one more oddball Japanese camera for today: Anny-44 from Hoei Industrial Co., circa 1960. Fixed focus, single (self cocking) shutter speed, but variable aperture. Rangefinder window actually indicates whether the shutter lock is engaged. It feels like something that a person might have given to a child, from an era when "Made in Japan" was not not necessarily a mark of quality. Produced 4x4 images on 127 rollfilm.

 

[JJB70]

My Nikon SP, beautiful condition but it has fungus in the rangefinder so the image is very in distinct.
I have asked about cleaning/splitting the block re-balsam or thought about buying another Sp and swop over rangefinders.
If anyone wants to give it a good home let me know.


Keith

Lovely camera, the scourge of fungus is probably worth its own thread as it is a nightmare if it takes hold. The best thing is to try and prevent it, failing that jump on it early. Once it is serious then it is a bit of a lottery. I don't know about range finders but with SLR lenses killing and cleaning fungus isn't difficult, the problem is what it leaves behind in terms of damaged coatings and tracking lines. That's a nice camera, definitely worth having a go to clean.

 

[JeffS7444]

My Nikon SP, beautiful condition but it has fungus in the rangefinder so the image is very in distinct.
I have asked about cleaning/splitting the block re-balsam or thought about buying another Sp and swop over rangefinders.
If anyone wants to give it a good home let me know.

Tempting! But I have no idea of it's fair market value in it's current state.

 

[JeffS7444]

MC Zenitar 16mm f/2.8

MC Zenitar 16mm f/2.8 Filter size: 26.5mm x 0.5 (rear mount) Close focus: 0.3 meters Aperture range: f/2.8 - f/22 Depth of field scal...

icouldbeahero.blogspot.com

The 16 mm Zenitar and 8 mm Peleng fisheye lenses (I have them in M42 mount) satisfy my periodic super-ultra wideangle fetishes, though in recent years it seems I can sometimes get better deals on Nikon or Canon lenses. Nikon in particular seems to have sold an awful lot of 16 mm fisheye lenses and 28 and 35 mm perspective-control lenses, and there are bargains to be had there.

 

[Gorgonzola]

Geez!! Yet even another camera I forgot about for a while ...

Vivitar 35EM Compact 35mm (manual focus 35mm focal length); the lens barrel retracted into the camera body using a lever on the bottom ... maybe not in the quality league of the Minox or Rollie ultra compacts but I used in with good results on several business trips when I wanted to travel light ...

 

[mhardy6647]

I thought I'd mentioned this little rascal -- but apparently I haven't.

So, way, way way back when (eighth grade), one of my classmates received from his father (a Merchant Marine captain) a Minolta SR-T101... and our class's camera craze was off and running. We also had a teacher who was a photography buff ("Honeywell" Asahi Pentax Spotmatic F -- M42 mount, in those days).
Another classmate acquired a Bell & Howell (Canon) SLR: the Bell & Howell Auto 35/Reflex Design 237 (a/ka/ Canon EX EE). This is a rather peculiar little camera in that the lens is fixed, but the outer elements are removable. A moderate WA and a moderate tele were available for it.
Now, the nice thing about this Bell & Howell was that a catalog retailer called W. Bell & Company (which had a store in Baltimore) carried these cameras at an attractive discount price. I kind of fixated on wanting one of these -- but, as already mentioned, my parents got me the 500TL as a Christmas present and I was off to the races, so to speak

At any rate, I was always kind of fascinated by this model, and my son picked one up, with accessory lenses, somewhere along the line and... well... it's here now. He quite liked it, as it happens.

This Old Camera: Bell & Howell Auto 35/Reflex Design 237

Bell & Howell Auto 35/Reflex Design 237 AKA Canon EX EE Camera type: 35mm SLR Lens Mount: The rear 3 elements of the lens are fixe...

icouldbeahero.blogspot.com

I ended up getting involved in photography for our yearbooks (starting in 1973) and having an M42 camera turned out to be a good choice, as "we" could platoon lenses with the aforementioned teacher (who was also the yearbook advisor) with the Pentax.