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Your worst camera ever


ruslan

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A sad topic, I know. What is the most disappointing camera you used or rented and why?

Mine was Yashica 109 MP: this is what I could afford in 1997, was bought new. Very noisy motor and film transportation mechanism, it broke after 5 rolls (I remember that moment: I was on the beach near nude girls to capture them, on the Volga). The 35-70/3.5-4.5 was soft so soft and the zooming mechanism was awfully tight, the body was always sqeaking. At f11 the lens was totally unusable. Got rid of it in 2003.

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It was probably the most beautiful camera I've owned -- the Contarex Bullseye. Stunning engineering, good quality lenses, and absolutely gorgeous. But the selenium meter was off by about a stop and a half and the ergonomics of the camera were the worst, though the Voigtlander Prominent could give it some competition. And it was massive and quite heavy and so were the lenses. I expect this was a great lab camera or studio camera in the old days. In use though it was very disappointing. Plus ironically I felt it compared unfavorably to the ergnomics of the Contax/Yashica SLRs and their lenses too. Great engineering, but murder to carry around and use.

 

I felt the named Prominent was similar in this respect with superb optics (maybe better than the lenses I had with the bullseye) but the controls were very weird and hard to use.

 

Now I suppose I should think again as at least two of my Contax/Yashica bodies have become unusable due to bad (and now unrepairable) electronics while I bet that Bullseye is still working!

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Many people here know of my frustration with a Kodak Signet 35 that I was made to use in the field in 1962

 

It was ugly (morbidly obese art deco), hard to load, hard to focus. The only camera I ever hated.

 

I will stipulate that the lens wasn't too bad, once you got past the awfulness of the gestalt.

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I have tried out a lot of cameras, especially back in the film days. I don't think I was ever really disappointed by one, but quite a few were not a good fit for me.

 

1. Minolta Autocord - against better advice, I bought the one with the CdS meter. The meter is so awkward to use that you might as well use a hand held meter. That would have saved me a lot of money! Also, I like to take a lot of photos to get one right. Having twelve frames on an expensive roll of Velvia was just not my thing. I never went back to 120 film.

 

2. Minolta X-700. I had an extensive Minolta manual focus system - XD, XE, SRT, SR. I loved them all, but the X-700 just couldn't hold a candle to the older models, especially my beloved XD-11. I later bought a X-500 for the TTL flash metering capability, but I always preferred the XD series.

 

3. Minolta 600si. Beautiful camera, great ergonomics, but I felt AF in those days wasn't quite there yet. I was always quicker and more accurate to focus with my XD series cameras. It didn't help the 600si that it came with a 24-85mm that was shockingly unsharp. I never worked out if it was a problem with that lens in general, or just with the one I got. I bought it second hand, so maybe something was wrong with it.

 

Oh, scrap all that, I just remembered that I bought a little Lumix under water camera a few years back. Great underwater photos and video, even though I only held it about a meter under water with my arm. Absolutely loved the results, but it never powered back up after that very first use. That was a disappointment!

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My worst cameras were my 2 Leicaflex SL2's. They had meter problems, and one had a battery compartment that wouldn't stop tarnishing over, making the light meter inoperable. I remember sending one SL2 back for repairs and waiting 5 weeks to the day to get back an unrepaired camera. I sent it off again and waited another 5 weeks to the day before they finally fixed it. Needless to say I was not impressed with Leica quality and soon switched to Canon.
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Minolta 600si. Beautiful camera, great ergonomics, but I felt AF in those days wasn't quite there yet. I was always quicker and more accurate to focus with my XD series cameras. It didn't help the 600si that it came with a 24-85mm that was shockingly unsharp. I never worked out if it was a problem with that lens in general, or just with the one I got. I bought it second hand, so maybe something was wrong with it.

I remember it, the reviews called it plasticky. I did not trust nor like that camera just looked at it on paper and I bought the hyped pre owned Nikon F90. The camera was better than Yashica 109, but the rear back coverings started to exfoliate!

***

After F90 I got Olympus E-420 which was excellent and worked for 10 years seamlessly and was sold, (one drawback was thick AA filter but ok, I used it in tropical heat and siberian cold).

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I remember it, the reviews called it plasticky. I did not trust nor like that camera just looked at it on paper and I bought the hyped pre owned Nikon F90. The camera was better than Yashica 109, but the rear back coverings started to exfoliate!

***

After F90 I got Olympus E-420 which was excellent and worked for 10 years seamlessly and was sold, (one drawback was thick AA filter but ok, I used it in tropical heat and siberian cold).

I have tried out a lot of cameras, especially back in the film days. I don't think I was ever really disappointed by one, but quite a few were not a good fit for me.

 

1. Minolta Autocord - against better advice, I bought the one with the CdS meter. The meter is so awkward to use that you might as well use a hand held meter. That would have saved me a lot of money! Also, I like to take a lot of photos to get one right. Having twelve frames on an expensive roll of Velvia was just not my thing. I never went back to 120 film.

 

2. Minolta X-700. I had an extensive Minolta manual focus system - XD, XE, SRT, SR. I loved them all, but the X-700 just couldn't hold a candle to the older models, especially my beloved XD-11. I later bought a X-500 for the TTL flash metering capability, but I always preferred the XD series.

 

3. Minolta 600si. Beautiful camera, great ergonomics, but I felt AF in those days wasn't quite there yet. I was always quicker and more accurate to focus with my XD series cameras. It didn't help the 600si that it came with a 24-85mm that was shockingly unsharp. I never worked out if it was a problem with that lens in general, or just with the one I got. I bought it second hand, so maybe something was wrong with it.

 

Oh, scrap all that, I just remembered that I bought a little Lumix under water camera a few years back. Great underwater photos and video, even though I only held it about a meter under water with my arm. Absolutely loved the results, but it never powered back up after that very first use. That was a disappointment!

 

The 600si was one of my favorite cameras. Yes it was "plasticky" but that meant light and the control layout was the best. As a landscape shooter, the AF speed wasn't an issue for me, but the control layout was. Never had an X700 in my Minolta days but I still have 2 600si's. Granted they're in a drawer somewhere.;)

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Canon AE-1. It wasn't necessarily a bad camera, just over-rated. I know they AE-1 heralded in some manufacturing innovations, but it also introduced a host of superfluos features that other manufacturers soon followed.

 

The camera sucked 6volt batteries like they were jolly ranchers. It only had shutter priority mode, which is the most useless exposure mode for enthusiasts unlike AE priority where you can dynamically turn the aperture ring while looking through the view finder and present yourself options. It wasn't very durable. Sucky 60/sec flash. Terrible shutter / mirror recoil that compared to my later purchased FE-2 felt like an AK-47 and made the camera impossible to handhold while the FE-2 could go down to rangefinder shutter speeds and deliver clear shots.

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Guest jakenan

Some sort of Italian / European folding-job sold as " WORKS GREAT! SHUTTER EXCELLENT! GREAT USER!"

Came to me in a box reeking pee and cigars and a seized shutter and lens cemented on so it couldn't removed to get a CLA.

Thankfully it came with right of return with free passage home, so I returned it to the marketing agent who sold it to me.

Little did I know he was a Dr Jeckel Mr Hyde type, and not running on full compression. Then, I got a free gift: a barrage of insults

from this guy swearing like a stevadore. And I thought Canadians were polite and ez going !

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My worst camera was a Kodak Pony II, a late-1950s 35mm model. The 44mm f/3.9 lens wasn't bad, but the camera's fixed shutter speed was only about 1/25 second. Rarely could I hold it steady enough to get a sharp picture. Positioning the shutter release next to the lens instead of atop the camera didn't help. Also, the lens was marked in AV stops, not f/stops. This was my first "good" camera and I didn't know the difference in those days. The camera had no meter, so I relied on the instructions that came with film. When the Plus-X instructions told me to set f/11, I used AV-11. As a result, all my photos were drastically overexposed, and it took me a while to understand why. Also, the flash attachment remained "live" unless the shutter was cocked. This feature wasted flash bulbs and blinded me a few times when I snapped a new bulb into the socket before winding the film from the previous exposure. Finally I quit and gave the camera to my sister, who shot one roll of film and got a Polaroid instead.

 

F. Mueller, I'm surprised you didn't like the Minolta X-700. We had one at a magazine where I worked, and it was great. We ran hundreds of rolls through that camera every year and it never gave up. Also, the film advance was the smoothest I've ever experienced with an SLR, surpassed only by a Leica M4-2 that I once owned.

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I have tried out a lot of cameras, especially back in the film days. I don't think I was ever really disappointed by one, but quite a few were not a good fit for me.

 

1. Minolta Autocord - against better advice, I bought the one with the CdS meter. The meter is so awkward to use that you might as well use a hand held meter. That would have saved me a lot of money! Also, I like to take a lot of photos to get one right. Having twelve frames on an expensive roll of Velvia was just not my thing. I never went back to 120 film.

 

2. Minolta X-700. I had an extensive Minolta manual focus system - XD, XE, SRT, SR. I loved them all, but the X-700 just couldn't hold a candle to the older models, especially my beloved XD-11. I later bought a X-500 for the TTL flash metering capability, but I always preferred the XD series.

 

3. Minolta 600si. Beautiful camera, great ergonomics, but I felt AF in those days wasn't quite there yet. I was always quicker and more accurate to focus with my XD series cameras. It didn't help the 600si that it came with a 24-85mm that was shockingly unsharp. I never worked out if it was a problem with that lens in general, or just with the one I got. I bought it second hand, so maybe something was wrong with it.

 

Oh, scrap all that, I just remembered that I bought a little Lumix under water camera a few years back. Great underwater photos and video, even though I only held it about a meter under water with my arm. Absolutely loved the results, but it never powered back up after that very first use. That was a disappointment!

I definitely share your appreciation for the XD.

I had considered buying the X-700 a few years ago, but after i borrowed a friends X-570, found i liked that better.

I owned three Canon A-1 bodies, and i shot them A LOT, but had i known more about Minolta in the late 70's and early 80's, i never would have bothered with any of the Canon A-Series cameras.......;)

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My first SLR was a Nikon N4004s. It didn't win my award for "worst" because of functionality, but usability. When shooting in Program, Shutter or Aperture modes there was no exposure information. The only way to know the exposure info was to use Manual mode, in which case you'd use "+ o -".

 

Eric Sande

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My first SLR was a Nikon N4004s. It didn't win my award for "worst" because of functionality, but usability. When shooting in Program, Shutter or Aperture modes there was no exposure information. The only way to know the exposure info was to use Manual mode, in which case you'd use "+ o -".

 

Eric Sande

I remember it, and I bet, being amateur camera that Nikon of 1987 was better than my Yashica!

One of our photographer used it in combo with AF 50/1.8, - it survived after many photoshoots, many years of use!

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A Nikonos II with an erratic film winding mechanism. The spacing between frames was uneven so that when I got a roll with prints returned, individual prints would have part of one frame on a print and part of another, so I would bring the negatives back to the store and have them reprinted. The winding mechanism finally quit on the second day of a three week kayaking trip through the Grand Canyon when I lent the Nikonos to a friend to take my photo going through a rapid. The photo turned out great but that was the last shot the camera made before being repaired after the trip. Fortunately, I had my trusty (but not waterproof) Canon F1 along on the trip.

 

Among my least favorites, I must include my Canon T90 with the dreaded intermittent sticky magnet problem. It was a great camera when it worked properly, but was not to trusted for any critical photography, so I gave up on it and went back to my trusty F1. I still have the T90, because I would feel guilty selling it to anyone. After about twenty years of flawlessly reliable use, my trusty F1 got stolen.

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