Please recommend 50 Vintage Cameras I should Collect

Hey guys,

 

I have a question, have you ever purchased a used camera online? I have seen some stuff that I am very interested at a reasonable cost but since It is online, I won't have a chance to inspect it before I pay for the item. I have no problem buying online if it is brand new but for second hand items, I have some reservations. I prefer all cameras in my collection to be in mint or at least in very good condition and of course a working unit, I am worried that If i buy online, I will be disappointed. :)

 

Currently I am wiling to travel 100 miles just to check out a camera I am interested in buying. I think its part of the joys of collecting. :)

 

I have used KEH regularly for the last four years. Rarely a problem but if you have one they take care of it promptly.

I bought 2 cameras today. 1 is a nikon F with lense which I bought for US$300

and the other 1 is a minolta SRT101 with lens for 125$

Both cameras are in very good condition and fully functional .

 

Lenses are both very clean

 

I also ordered 2 books in Amazon about retro cameras as suggested by @JDMvW .

1. Retro Cameras - The collectors Guide to vintage Film Camera

2. Comprehensive Guide for Camera Collectors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That Nikon F with plain prism is a sweet camera..

My almost complete set of Pentax 110 SLR arrived last weekend. :) I bought it in ebay for 145$+tax

 

Hey guys,

 

Can I ask if a Tessina 35 in almost mint condition a fair price for 250$? I don't need it to be a bargain, Just a fair price. Thank you very much. :)

 

 

 

JDM, a widely reciognized contributor here, would likely argue the Asian Ashiflex was earlier..

Actually I think the Contax S was earlier of the real and actually existing cameras, although Exakta and Praktiflex had add-on prisms pretty early on.

Can I ask if a Tessina 35 in almost mint condition a fair price for 250$? I don't need it to be a bargain, Just a fair price.

 

Its a fair price if it works well, if not repairs would at least double the final cost. Of course, if you just want a display piece and don't care if it works, the value is whatever you place on it.

 

Do careful inspections of the classics you are buying: a lot of wonderful cameras have Achilles Heels that can be disappointing and/or expensive to rectify. Its a good idea to research common problems before paying market rate or premium for what seems like a "mint" piece. Example being your lovely Nikon F: the plain prism is a notorious time bomb of disappointment waiting to explode, especially the older version with rectangular eyepiece. Examine the view meticulously with the camera aimed at an even bright white wall or paper, making sure there are no "floaters" (dark spots) or vertical lines forming near the center. For $300 you should have gotten pristine prism glass with no such signs of desilvering deterioration.

 

The Minolta SRT, like many similar cameras of its era, is prone to corrosion and disconnection of the tiny wires between battery chamber and meter circuit. Doesn't matter if a camera is priced accordingly and you don't need the meter, but at market rate the thing should work as perfectly as it looks. I suppose it depends on your own particular collecting drive: some people just want the best-looking examples for display and play, while some require a camera to operate as well as it looks. There is room to fudge between these two attitudes, but don't overpay for examples with issues: if you change your mind later, its much harder to recoup the costs on resale of broken cameras even if they look mint (exceptions being crazy mega-collectibles rich people love to display, like Leica RF and Rolleiflex TLR).

 

Here a couple thoughts on what you might add later if you pursue what you've shown so far. Your Nikon F is a beauty, but the lens on it doesn't quite match its era (excellent lens tho, and its got the genuine Nikon AI modification: hard to find in this condition). I'd keep the existing lens to use, or maybe sell later, but to make your F more "vintage-correct' consider adding a 5cm f/2 Nikkor-S lens (see mine pictured below). This was the original lens supplied with the F in its first few years, forgotten today and a completely different optical formula from the highly regarded, later, more common Nikkor-H that you have now.

 

The older S has an additional element and makes pictures with a slightly different bokeh and focus falloff: definitely worth having. There are several versions of 5cm-S, very early ones should be left to wealthy collectors but the final run (like mine) can often be found for just $40. There was a faster companion to the 5cm-S, the 5.8cm f/1.4: very nifty lens but very hard to find now without separation damage. And of course, no Nikon F is complete without a silver-nose 105mm Nikkor-P: the lens that made Nikon a legend (also pictured below). Plenty of these available at reasonable prices, esp if they haven't been AI-modified.

 

Going another direction, since you picked up the wonderful Pentax 110, you really need to add its predecessor the Minolta 110 Zoom SLR (below, the only other 110 SLR ever made). Very easy to find at low cost. More elegant and expensive was the Rollei A110, not an SLR but the smallest premium 110. In a similar vein, there were some very cool 126 cartridge cameras with German lenses like the Kodak Instamatic Reflex, Kodak Instamatic 500 (my favorite) and Rollei A26. 35mm zone focus (non-rangefinder) cameras made by Voigtlander are fun and mostly inexpensive to acquire (shown below is my Vito II folder and Vito B with XL viewfinder). If you've got the storage or display space, buy everything you like until you run out of money!

 

Edited January 26, 2021 by orsetto

Its a fair price if it works well, if not repairs would at least double the final cost. Of course, if you just want a display piece and don't care if it works, the value is whatever you place on it.

 

Do careful inspections of the classics you are buying: a lot of wonderful cameras have Achilles Heels that can be disappointing and/or expensive to rectify. Its a good idea to research common problems before paying market rate or premium for what seems like a "mint" piece. Example being your lovely Nikon F: the plain prism is a notorious time bomb of disappointment waiting to explode, especially the older version with rectangular eyepiece. Examine the view meticulously with the camera aimed at an even bright white wall or paper, making sure there are no "floaters" (dark spots) or vertical lines forming near the center. For $300 you should have gotten pristine prism glass with no such signs of desilvering deterioration.

 

The Minolta SRT, like many similar cameras of its era, is prone to corrosion and disconnection of the tiny wires between battery chamber and meter circuit. Doesn't matter if a camera is priced accordingly and you don't need the meter, but at market rate the thing should work as perfectly as it looks. I suppose it depends on your own particular collecting drive: some people just want the best-looking examples for display and play, while some require a camera to operate as well as it looks. There is room to fudge between these two attitudes, but don't overpay for examples with issues: if you change your mind later, its much harder to recoup the costs on resale of broken cameras even if they look mint (exceptions being crazy mega-collectibles rich people love to display, like Leica RF and Rolleiflex TLR).

 

Here a couple thoughts on what you might add later if you pursue what you've shown so far. Your Nikon F is a beauty, but the lens on it doesn't quite match its era (excellent lens tho, and its got the genuine Nikon AI modification: hard to find in this condition). I'd keep the existing lens to use, or maybe sell later, but to make your F more "vintage-correct' consider adding a 5cm f/2 Nikkor-S lens (see mine pictured below). This was the original lens supplied with the F in its first few years, forgotten today and a completely different optical formula from the highly regarded, later, more common Nikkor-H that you have now.

 

The older S has an additional element and makes pictures with a slightly different bokeh and focus falloff: definitely worth having. There are several versions of 5cm-S, very early ones should be left to wealthy collectors but the final run (like mine) can often be found for just $40. There was a faster companion to the 5cm-S, the 5.8cm f/1.4: very nifty lens but very hard to find now without separation damage. And of course, no Nikon F is complete without a silver-nose 105mm Nikkor-P: the lens that made Nikon a legend (also pictured below). Plenty of these available at reasonable prices, esp if they haven't been AI-modified.

 

Going another direction, since you picked up the wonderful Pentax 110, you really need to add its predecessor the Minolta 110 Zoom SLR (below, the only other 110 SLR ever made). Very easy to find at low cost. More elegant and expensive was the Rollei A110, not an SLR but the smallest premium 110. In a similar vein, there were some very cool 126 cartridge cameras with German lenses like the Kodak Instamatic Reflex, Kodak Instamatic 500 (my favorite) and Rollei A26. 35mm zone focus (non-rangefinder) cameras made by Voigtlander are fun and mostly inexpensive to acquire (shown below is my Vito II folder and Vito B with XL viewfinder). If you've got the storage or display space, buy everything you like until you run out of money!

 

 

Thank you very much Orsetto, I have learned more from your post than 4 weeks of reading in the internet. :)

You have such a beautiful collection!!! Can I see more pictures? Please?

The pictures of your collection make me drool like a little puppy. :)

Sir,

 

You may find it equally enjoyable to ferret out why the manufacturers changed their designs.

 

Your newly aquired Rollei 35 can provide one example of mutations over time (production in Germany and Singapore, different lenses, light meter or not plus some versions to lure well paying collectors,

 

The Canons you started to take an interest in ,are equally interesting. The Leika\Contax-challenging rangefinders were supplemented with a mirror box rather like the German competitors,, followed by the Canonflex . There is even a special version of the F1 for phone companie, rasther liike the Leica -"Post". Later, canon met the autofocus challenge by producing some lensdes containing the distance measuring mechanism. A canon collection might encompass all these.

 

p,

Thank you @ph for your advice, well noted. :)

If you've got the storage or display space, buy everything you like until you run out of money!

 

Hahahahahaha this one made me laugh. My wife would kill me if I followed your last advice. :)

I haven't posted in a while. Anyway I am planning to purchase 2 cameras a month until my collection of 50 classic manual cameras are complete. :)

 

So for February, here is what I purchased.

A Nikon F3 in very good condition with a 50mm pancake lens. I bought it for 200$.

Now since I have an F and an F3, It is imperative that I buy a an F2. :)

 

Funny, but I cant seem to find very good Canon Cameras with lens with a good price, Well I have a lot time to buy 1. 2 years at least.

 

 

 

Yesterday, I visited the guy selling the Nikon EL body. He was just 17 miles away. A mere 30 minute relax driving. I bought the EL for $60. Not really cheap but the camera was in very good condition and everything was working fine. He also showed me a Rollie 35 and after much bargaining he agreed to sell it for 110$ again not cheap but the camera was in mint condition and everything was working including the meter so I bought it.

 

I am worried that I will get addicted to this. I hope that I don't feel victim to impulsive buying. :)

 

[ATTACH=full]1369134[/ATTACH]

 

 

Here is the Rollei 35T. :)

 

[ATTACH=full]1369135[/ATTACH]

 

I also ordered 2 books from Amazon about Camera Collecting. Well I will have something to read during the new year.

I am a Nikon fan and my best one so far is the FE,I love the way it handles and the metering is the best I have used for consistent results for my needs.However the one camera I really was happy with was the Rolliecord 4 ,a superb lens and fitted with a brighter screen it was a joy to use.I spent a few hours in the darkroom today setting up my old bessler enlarger again and used one of my Rollei negs and was so pleased with the result ,not just the sharpness but the character of the lens is so good.My advice would be to buy selectively to use the cameras as it is far more fun to try out a new one and revisit old favourites.I had over 300 cameras in my collection at one point and now am down to about 10 using ones and a box of others that will go on E Bay to fund film and paper.

To get started with your search, just buy one of each camera Zeiss Ikon made.

I haven't posted in a while. Anyway I am planning to purchase 2 cameras a month until my collection of 50 classic manual cameras are complete. :)

 

So for February, here is what I purchased.

A Nikon F3 in very good condition with a 50mm pancake lens. I bought it for 200$.

Now since I have an F and an F3, It is imperative that I buy a an F2. :)

 

Funny, but I cant seem to find very good Canon Cameras with lens with a good price, Well I have a lot time to buy 1. 2 years at least.

 

 

[ATTACH=full]1376179[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1376180[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1376181[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1376183[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH=full]1376182[/ATTACH]

 

Very nice camera but wrong lens. Back then people would use an EM with AI lenses but nobody used a series E lenses on an F3.

Any way just the Nikon F's series would be more than 20 if you collect all variation of black and chrome as well as differences in viewfinders and body materials like titanium version as well as some with non moving mirror.

Very nice camera but wrong lens. Back then people would use an EM with AI lenses but nobody used a series E lenses on an F3.

 

That is NOT a series E Nikon 50/1.8, but rather a normal Nikkor 50/1.8 AiS. :cool: or was it called "long nose" pancake?

Late to this thread and I haven't read through it all, but I had a lot of old cameras, some quite "classic," and I base my response partly on the ones I did not decide to give away.

 

I kept a pile of Olympus XA's, either XA2 or plain XA. This little gem is pocketable, sharp, its auto exposure is reliable, it's nearly silent in operation, and easy to shoot from the hip, making it a nearly ideal street and casual camera, but still capable of making a decently sharp biggish print. XA's tend, occasionally, to stop working, especially, it seems, if used consistently in very cold weather when it seems some little integrated circuit conks out. Since they're not economical to fix, I just have an obscenely excessive little pile of them. One of the best I got free here from someone who had run over it with his car. It bent the back and disconnected some little part inside. I replaced the back with one from my most recently dead XA3, fixed the little part inside, and it worked just fine. XA's are tough little contenders.

 

I will never get rid of my Nikon F's or my F3. The F3 makes lovely images, feels right in the hand. When you handle it, the quality is tangible. The inexpensive 50/2 AI lens is a great match here, sharp, compact and rugged.

 

The original F is a little big, its Photomic finders a little ugly, but it is a mechanical masterpiece, and capable of superb images. I always liked its weight and its superb viewfinder, and found it easy to make good shots.

 

Nikon has the slight disadvantage for collecting, that because they kept the same mount forever, the good lenses are still sought out by users.

 

I also kept some old Minoltas, in part because they're not worth much. But the optics are great. Various small variations of the old SRT are robust and reliable. I have an SRT-102 that's very comfortable to use, and one of many X-700's (noted for bad capacitors) actually still works. Good Minolta glass is lovely, and often crazily cheap. The working X-700 is one I actually got free from someone here, with a 50/1.7 lens which proved to be about as good as anything ever. I kept also a nearly unused X-370, which aside from making good pictures, has what for some reason seems like the most accurate meter I've ever used. I used this at various times as a calibration standard when re-calibrating old Photomic Nikons. Match your meter to the Minolta, and even your Velvia slides will come out right.

 

One of the classics I gave away was the Canon A-1. If you like Canons and like the classic look, this is a wonderful camera. Mine worked well though it had a trace of the dreaded squeak. It looked beautiful. As a long-time Nikon user, I found the Canon's arrangement of functions odd and annoying, so I tossed it in the direction of one of my kids, who likes Canons. Canon mount lenses can be fairly easy to find, especially since the older breech mount does not fit newer ones.

 

I also liked the Pentax Spotmatic, notable among classics for being able to function with modern batteries without any modification. Nonetheless, I gave mine away complete with the grand F1.4 lens. Same with the K-1000. Great classics, but you can't keep everything and I didn't want to start collecting their lenses.

 

I also got rid of a couple of functional Konica FT3's. Konica glass is nice, the cameras work, but they're big and noisy, and when it came right down to it, I decided they don't do anything for me better than contemporary Nikons and Minoltas. Although many such cameras are loud, the Nikon F much so, I think the Konica FT3 was in a class by itself, sounding like a slamming barn door.

 

I also got rid of some Yashicas. Nice cameras in the main, and good lenses. Their cheap kit zoom (42-75 I think) was surprisingly decent. But the cameras tended to break, were hard or impossible to fix, and Yashica had the worst leather imaginable, so often a good one looks awful.

 

If you're starting out with classics, I would suggest one avenue might be to skip the SLR's, nice as some are, and go for compact 35's. There are many small variations in these, and the best are amazingly good. Aside from the Olympus XA, for example, are other earlier Olympuses, some of which are optically surprising. Ricoh and Sears made an inexpensive 35 that was excellent. Minolta made a few as well. I had a Yashica Minister that was great. Some of the old classics require odd batteries and aren't easy to recalibrate, but some use modern batteries, and most can be run without batteries as sunny-16 manuals. One exception to this was some Konica one I had, which was only automatic, and had a glitchy battery too. Lovely optics, but not fun to use.

 

I should mention also that I kept a "Barnack" Leica IIIb and some lenses, but these are not easy to find and poor economy. I have a minty Rodenstock Heligon 35 mm. lens for mine, which I have had forever, and I recently looked it up and it's worth something like a thousand bucks. Crazy!

 

If I were starting a classics-only collection from scratch and determined to do SLR's, I think I'd look first at Minoltas, because they and their glass are relatively easy to find and inexpensive, but the image quality is good.

OP...don't neglect the cine' cameras...

 

 

I also have a few Bolex.

 

And while you are at it, get some stereo cameras.

A Leica thread mount and an M camera with contemporary lenses ought to be on your list, but as they are likely to be quite expensive especially in good working order, it would be a good idea to stay continuously alert and ready to act when they show up at a price you are willing to pay.

Oh, I almost forgot, one of the other cameras I kept, and that is a Rollei 35. Mine is a black bodied one with Schneider Xenon lens, apparently rather rare, but at the time I got mine it was not considered particularly desirable. Mine also has the advantage of having slighly dented corners, making it a poor collectible but a great user. These are pretty, compact and sharp zone focusing cameras, with an averaging meter that may not be very trustworthy. Eccentric in design, including a flash bracket on the bottom, a battery that can be accessed only with the film out, a meter that does not turn off, and right-to-left film travel with the wind lever on the left, but they are nice to use, and nice to look at.

Oh, I almost forgot, one of the other cameras I kept, and that is a Rollei 35. Mine is a black bodied one with Schneider Xenon lens, apparently rather rare, but at the time I got mine it was not considered particularly desirable. Mine also has the advantage of having slighly dented corners, making it a poor collectible but a great user. These are pretty, compact and sharp zone focusing cameras, with an averaging meter that may not be very trustworthy. Eccentric in design, including a flash bracket on the bottom, a battery that can be accessed only with the film out, a meter that does not turn off, and right-to-left film travel with the wind lever on the left, but they are nice to use, and nice to look at.

I was tempted when they came out.

I would add a caution on those old Voigtlander rangefinders. They come with a choice of lenses, and even the lesser ones make good pictures, but be aware that the same model camera can have different grades of lens. The other thing about them, and one that requires a firm ability to return a bad one, is that the rangefinder is made with a glued-together block of elements, and if dropped that block can come apart. When that happens, the rangefinder will never be accurate again. The camera will still work, but it's essentially not worth trying to repair. If you get a good one and don't drop it or break it, you will be happy with the camera. The "color Skopar" is the better grade of lens. I can't remember the others, but I think the lesser one was a Lanthar, and there was a superior one that's scarce as hens' teeth.

 

The Vito is a sweet little camera, but you should be aware that its odd winding mechanism means you cannot dry fire it. This may work in your favor if someone has one and thinks it's broken. To test it without film, you must open the back and use the film sprocket to cock the shutter.

 

Some of these models had a coupled selenium meter, and surprisingly, at least on the ones I've used, that meter tends to be accurate.

From innovation, quality, and precision point of view, I will hold onto the following:

- Leica M3 35mm rangefinder

- Rolleiflex 3.5F, 2.8C TLR

- Hasselblad 500C/M

- Linhof Tech V 4x5 field camera

 

From interesting and fun perspective, I will keep:

- Voigtlander Vitessa folding 35mm rangefinder with 50/2 Ultron lens

- Rollei 35S 35mm rangefinder with Sonnar lens

- Kodak Medalist 120 rangefinder camera with 105/3.5 Ektar lens

 

From reliable, simple, take everywhere, survive a desert island point of view:

- Nikon FM2n

- Konica Autoreflex T3/T4

- Fujica GL690/GW690/GSW690

- Pentax 67

- Mamiya C330

I'm not sure I'd bother with the Petri 35...

 

Not Quite a Masterpiece : the Petri Color 35

 

Petri Color 35