The Elicar MS-1 Medical Camera

The Elicar MS-1 Medical Camera came in its nice dedicated fitted case. The camera itself is nothing to write home about, being a re-badged Cosina with a cover over the shutter speed dial, fixing it at 1/125. The lens is another matter, a Elicar V-HQ Medical Macro MC 90mm f/2.5, a 1:1 macro which does not focus to infinity. Mine is missing its close up adapter which takes the magnification to 1:2.

 

It's no plastic fantastic, being metal and very substantially built. There is a double focusing helix, turning the central barrel extends both the front and rear parts. It operates very smoothly. The lens has a built in ringflash, with an sensor on a little tube at the front which provides automatic exposure. The aperture scale is calibrated not in F numbers, but in ISO values, from 8 to 400 ISO, so that for very slow films, the aperture will open up, at the expense of depth of field. I expect this didn't matter much when being used for its original putpose, photographing spots and pimples etc. The settings for 200 and 400 ISO seem to correspond to F/22 and F/16.

 

The MS-1 concept is similar to that of the Yashica Dental Eye which appears occasionally on the auction site. However unlike the Dental Eye, which has a more or less fixed lens, the Elicar is a normal K-mount, usable on Pentax digital SLR's like my KM. The flash trigger voltage is around 6V, so it's safe, but the polarity needs to be reversed to enable synchronisation. Just cut a flash cable through and cross-connect the wires.

 

Here's a detail of the lens markings.

I set the KM to manual mode at 1/125 200 ISO, and the lens to 200ISO = F/16, so that it would behave exactly like a the 35mm camera with 200ISO film. The auto flash made a pretty good job of setting the exposure, being slightly under, which I don't mind at all for flower photography. The only adjustments were slight tweaks to the levels, and to the colour temperature, the latter because I'd forgotten to change the white balance from auto to flash.

 

The pictures exhibit the typical ringflash look, almost forensic in detail. But that's exactly what it was designed to do. Perhaps next time I'll use ambient light.

 

There aren't many flowers at the Botanic Garden yet.

 

Another one.

None of these came anywhere near to the full 1:1 magnification. Here's the last one, and thank you for looking.

 

Nice results. Thanks for sharing.

I believe the lens is a re-badged Kiron (Kino Precision Optical), and the ring-flash looks very similar to one that was sold under the Cobra and Starblitz names, among others.

 

I seem to remember that Vivitar badge-engineered that Kiron lens as well. It was mooted that Tokina's plant was where all the models were actually produced. Not sure about that. It didn't look like other Tokina lenses of that era.

 

The Elicar/Kiron lens got very good reviews at the time (1980s IIRC), but I'm not sure if it edged out the 'legendary' Tamron 90mm f/2.5, which only focused to 2:1.

Here's a listing from a 1987 Popular Photography article on macros:

That one was 55mm; some sources suggest Komine as the lens maker.

Edited April 28, 2018 by JDMvW

Nice intro. Thanks! Great images, too.

Excellent, John; I've been away and just spotted this post. I could find many uses for that outfit. As you said, it would be interesting to see some shots using ambient light.