Sears 35mm equipment

When did Sears stop selling their 35mm camera equipment?<p/>I have a camera from the early 80s and it's holding

up well. I'm just wondering how the line as a whole holds up and what to expect if I buy old stuff online. I know

that the KS2 had some problems with the cable release.<p/>

Oh, The other thing is that I see bodies for sale and I have no idea what they are and their features. Searching

online hasn't yielded much for me. For example, I was trying to see what the feature difference between a KSX,

KSX Auto, KSX Super were. They all look like they were the same camera but with a different name - from what I

could find from online manuals. What I'm wondering is, is there a site that breaks down what the different models

were and their respective features?

<p/>Thank you.

Sears was always a reseller of camera equipment made by other companies. Many of those models were available in virtually identical form under other brand names.

 

The KSX -era Sears-branded SLRs were made by Ricoh. Very good SLRs that used the readily available K-mount lenses and featured sophisticated (for that era) auto-exposure options. If you broaden your search to include Ricoh you should be able to find more info.

Agree with Lex. Sears stopped selling Ricoh under their badging because it wasn't profitable enough for them to continue. I owned Ricoh cameras with (better) Pentax optics for a while and had good results. You might still be able to find Ricoh cameras under various names at Porter's Camera Store in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Don't know though, because I stopped receiving their catalogs a while back.

So far as I know (and that ain't much) they may still be selling some kind of 35mm. One of the Sears tricks from early days was to buy the entire production of some small factory for a few years and then force the company to sell out to Sears. That's how they ended up with the "Rochester Camera Co." at the turn of the 20th c. Their house name was "Tower" (from the original tower, not the one in Chicago now), and just about anything might be sold under that name.<div></div>

Sweet shutterbuggery! Argus' were that expensive back then?

 

I read somewhere, some time, that they had a Sears re-badged high end camera too... Can't remember if it was a Leica or something along those lines...

OK, all Sears sells now is named brand digital consumer cameras. The most advanced I saw was a Nikon D40.<p/>The

best I can see when I search Sears and Ricoh is that a KSX Super is a KR-10 and my KSX is a KR-7. Which leads to

another problem: what's a Ricoh KR-10 and what features does it have. Anyway, I guess I have a lot of searching

to do.

That Tower 35 for $173 was one of the top of the lines.That was a lot of money in 1954. It wasn't a Leica but one of the Japanese clones made after the war. Ironically, by giving the German patents to the world as reparations, another Axis power was the main beneficiary.

 

The camera shown is a Nicca, a similar camera was the later 5L. The Asahiflex (Tower SLR) was an almost exact copy of the 1938-47 or so Praktiflex from KW in Dresden.

 

The Argus C3 at the price shown was actually a reduction from discount prices that earlier had the camera as high as $74+ in the 1948 catalog.

There was also a United States Excise Tax Reduction Act of 1954 that may not have kicked in yet. There was, I think, about a 25% excise tax on new cameras, binoculars, etc. during the war and for quite a few years afterwards. That's one reason there were so many imported "used" cameras.

Great ad, JDM. I have several of those cameras and it's cool to see them advertised as new. Thanks for sharing that!

Kevin: I did a little research, tonight. Porter's camera Store in Cedar Falls, Iowa has been in business for many decades. They're very reputable. Currently they have a few new SLR cameras that would be compatible with your Ricoh/Pentax K Mount lenses. The brand is Promaster, but they look like Cosina bodies to me. (Nikon uses a Cosina body for its last film SLR camera. The Voigtlander Bessa series is also made by Cosina). Here's the link to the page:

http://porters.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=C3Q

The Tower must have been it then, it does look a lot like a Leica.

 

And I did think that the SLR looked like a Praktiflex! Seems like all they did was change the badge on the pop up screen cover. The lens looks even smaller though, more pancakey... Wonder which one was the better build.

In the late '50s Sears sold the Olympus Ace E 35mm rangefinder rebranded as the Tower 19. The four lenses that fit on the Ace and Ace E

from Olympus also will fit the Tower 19.

The Tower SLR's not a Praktiflex but an Asahiflex: http://www.aohc.it/slr01e.htm

>Nikon uses a Cosina body for its last film SLR camera.

 

The F5's a Cosina? I know some people like to claim that Cosina makes every camera coming out of Japan, but we

have only one April 1st every year.

 

The FM10 and FE10 were the only SLRs Cosina made for Nikon, period.

The F6 is Nikon's last camera, of course. When's photo.net gonna allow message editing like every other board??

Darn, last FILM camera...

I use to have a Tower TLR, wish I still had it.

April 1st? When the Warsaw Pact was officially dissolved? Is that when Cosina stopped making cameras for Nikon under the Tower name using reverse-engineered German technology?

Here is a chart from a Sears 1984/5 Camera catalog. It shows some of the KSX models along with other cameras of the day.<div></div>

Kevin --

 

Here's the list you're looking for. It lists the Ricoh SLR, that each Sears SLR is derived from:

 

 

http://www.butkus.org/chinon/sears.htm

Thanks Guys!

Fred C-- yes, as I said in more than one post before, the camera was an Asahiflex -- the point was that just as

the Nicca was a Leica copy, the Asahiflex was a Praktiflex copy -- eventually with the very well-conceived

optical viewfinder added. The mount of the Asahiflex lenses was screw-mount, but neither Leica nor Praktiflex thread.

 

And I would suspect that there is no contest in build quality, I think that the Asahiflex probably had the edge.

Marc, cool chart. Thanks.

I'm sorry to have forgotten that the F5 and F6 came after the FM10 and FE10. I should have stayed with the simple

statement that there's a relationship between the current Cosina KM Mount bodies and the FM10 & FE10. Hope this clears

my faux pas.

Has anyone here ever bought a Canon F1 from Sears? They did carry some very high end stuff, apparently.