ROLLEIFLEX SL66 QUESTION

Hello all,

I recently bought a long desired Rolleiflex SL66 and it came with a bunch of accessories that I am having trouble identifying.

I am assuming they are for some kind of Macro or Copy work, but I would like to ask for help in identifying them because the camera came with one lens and a box of these that I don't know what they are.

So Here are some of the pictures. Please let me know what they are.

Pictures 2.1 and 2.2 are of the same bayonet mount that was wrapped in a piece of brown paper that had the following numbers written on: 96.841.00.0

Thanks in advance

Milo

Photos 1 thru 3 appear to be the various pieces comprising the semi-auto extension tube set, which used a double cable release to stop down the lens before firing the camera. The silver rings might be adapters for reverse mounting the lenses for closeup work. Photos 5 and 8 appear to be the separate Extension Tube 40 and 80, which were not part of that kit.

Photo 4 appears to be the mount adapter for attaching Zeiss Luminar high magnification macro lenses to the bellows.

Photos 6.1 and 6.2 is some kind of cap, not clear what for. Could be to cap the body when lens removed, or might fit a lens that did not come with your purchase, or its part of the tube kit.

Photo 7 is either a tripod quick mount/release, or a tilt accessory? May not be specifically for SL66.

Photos 9 and 10 look like adapters for fitting compendium hoods or gel filter holders to the lenses.

THANK YOU, Orsetto! This helps a lot. Can you please help me understand something: Pictures 5 and 8 are the same item, sorry about the confusion. Picture 1 is a smaller version of the ring in 5 and 8. What is the silver ring on one side used for> It unscrews from both rings and there is a thread when it is unscrewed. I don't see how anything from the camera can be attached to it. What are they used for?

And is there a resource on the net where I can get information. I looked for a long time before I posted here and cannot find it.

Thanks again

Milo

Sorry, I'm not entirely clear on the purpose of the removable silver rings on the extension tube. There were several variations, and it can be hard to determine which were factory-supplied by Rollei and which were modified by specialty shops. In some cases the standard extension tubes were supplied and/or modified specifically with threads to accept barrel rings of large format view camera lenses and their standardized leaf shutters. Also, some versions of extension tube screw into each other, with only the camera and lens tubes having a bayonet (Nikon's earliest set worked the same way).

The SL66 accessories were versatile but can be very confusing today because no other camera company followed the same philosophy. For example, Rollei encouraged reverse mounting of lenses for closeup work by building compatible reversing bayonets into the front of several lenses. This runs counter to most other camera systems, where if they promote reversing at all it requires a separate adapter ring. OTOH, you might still need a Rollei reversing adapter for some lenses in combination with some accessories. Unfortunately the nstruction manuals for SL66 accessories have all but vanished. Since the SL66 was about as popular in its day as a lead brick necklace to a drowning man, it wasn't in common use at the rise of internet photography forums in the late '90s: web info on how to operate anything but the basic camera is sparse.

There was an excellent informative dedicated SL66 site I had bookmarked several years ago, but it seems to have disappeared. The only comprehensive SL66 site left is Rolleiflex SL66 all you want to know about these Rollei Cameras - www.sl66.com, which is a bit hard to navigate with some terrible interface elements, and much of its more arcane info has moved to a purchase model.

A clean sharp PDF file of the basic SL66 user manual is available at this link:

http://mjaatvedt.no/SL66_Manual_revised.pdf