jason_withers

My vote would have to go for a Retina Reflex III. Its beautifully finished.

Yes, one of the most beautiful!!

Here are a couple more

Kodak Chevron 620 camera. I love the heft of this one. Feels good in the hands, but I wish the viewfinder was bigger. Stellar Ektar lens!

chuck_foreman|1 said:

 

I've always been fussy about the condition of cameras I'm buying. This Kiev-4M arrived from the Ukraine with original packaging and ER case and some factory documentation, and I doubt that it had ever been used. Note that it still has the original plastic insert protecting the accessory shoe.

Rick, do you find that most of the old gear you by works as it should, or do you have to send a lot of it off to get fixed (or fix it yourself)? For me, its usually the latter....

Older light meters can still be pretty accurate and also easily adjustable if they aren't. I use my trusty General Electric PR-1. They are cheap online and have that classic look. Easy to use as well!

Thanks Mike and Hunter.

Mike, that’s great that you inherited some of your great aunt’s slides that she took with the camera. I imagine the colors on the Kodachromes still look great after all these years!

Hunter, my Kodak Signet 35 certainly wasn’t perfect when it arrived to me. The viewfinder was very dirty and the shutter wouldn’t reliably fire at all speeds. A service tag inside indicated that it was last serviced by Kodak many decades ago. I knew I wanted to use it and didn’t want to have to worry about the shutter failing, but I didn’t want to try fooling with it myself. So, I sent it off to Camera Works in Latham, NY and they CLAd it and I believe may have ultrasonically cleaned some of the pivot points and shutter to make sure it fired reliably. I later bought another Signet 35 (later version with the x-sync flash) and the shutter works on all speeds and didn’t require any repair work, so I’ve been using that one as well.

I too am a big Kodak camera fan. All the models I have are interesting, if not quirky! But, I just don’t get excited when using other film camera variants by Canon or Nikon the way I do when I use one my Kodaks. I have a Nikon F2 and FE that a friend gifted to me, but they do absolutely nothing for me, so I don’t use them.

Not my take on it. It may be small, but it's bulky and awkward to use.

Well, every camera has some limitations. The viewfinder on this particular model is fairly small, but it’s useable and the rangefinder works wells. Having to manually cock the shutter for each exposure does slow the camera down a bit. I’d sometimes forget to set it before taking the picture, but a minor inconvenience.

I wouldn’t say that this model would be the best camera for fast critical work, but it’s a durable, pocketable camera. It’s well made to boot. When I bought the camera, the viewfinder was pretty dim, but expected after 60+ years. I had it cleaned and it vastly improved its usability. I think it’s a fun camera to use :)

This past may, my partner and I took a long overdue trip to California and visited Yosemite, as well as the Bristlecone Pine Forest in Bishop. For the trip, I wanted to take along a camera that was fairly light weight, portable and would also easily fit into a jacket pocket and not be burdensome to carry on day hikes. I also did not want to have to fool around with multiple lenses or batteries. My Signet 35 camera fit the bill perfectly!

For those that may not be familiar with this camera, it's pretty small for a 35mm rangefinder, and only has 4 shutter speeds (25, 50, 100, and 300), but it does have a nice 44mm f/3.5 Ektar lens. Since the camera is all mechanical, without a light meter, I also carried my trusty G.E. PR-1 exposure meter. I brought along a couple rolls of Fomapan R100 film, a yellow filter, and a lens hood. I unfortunately didn't research in advance where to develop the Fomapan film once I finished the rolls, but I came across a guy in Iowa (dr5.us) online who takes traditional rolls of B&W negative film and runs them through a reversal process he created to get B&W slides. Of course, Fomapan R is already a reversal film, but I thought the results came out well through his processing. A few shots from the Bristlecone Pine Forest are below. I hope you enjoy!

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If - big if - the Retina actually reaches 1/500th at top speed, there may be a slight drop in exposure with the flash at full output.

 

The myth is that electronic flash has a duration of 1/1000th of a second or shorter, but this isn't true.

All the speedlights and portable electronic flashes that I've tested (more than a dozen over several makes) still have noticeable light output at more than 4 milliseconds after triggering.

[ATTACH=full]1361815[/ATTACH]

Blue line is a real trace from a storage oscilloscope capture of a speedlight flash at full output.

X axis is time in milliseconds.

 

You can see that at 2 ms, = 1/500th shutter speed, the light output has only reached about 70% of its cumulative exposure.

 

Add to that the decreasing efficiency of leaf shutters at higher speeds, and you've got a recipe for underexposure.

 

So, unless there's a real need for a high shutter speed, like balancing flash with ambient light, then it's probably best to stick with something like a 1/125th shutter speed that captures about 90 ~ 95% of the total light output.

 

For the sake of your camera; I'm pleased that that theory wasn't put to the test!

I feel fairly confident that the Retina reaches at least close to 1/500, as I had it CLAd a bit ago and it was brought to spec when it was done.

I haven’t finished the roll of film as of yet, but now that I’ve played around with it, the whole setup is a bit impractical to use with any frequency with the camera. The 522 flash with the retina reflex III is incredibly heavy and so I’d only use it occasionally. I agree with others too that a slower shutter speed would probably be better in most situations to capture some of the ambient light available.

Since your Retina has a leaf shutter and the Sunpak is a small battery powered flash that probably has a short flash duration, especially on auto settings at close distances, 1/500 should work just fine. If you want to mix ambient light with the flash then slower shutter speeds will allow that, depending on how much ambient light there is. A gated flash meter would be the best way to check this if you're reluctant to attach a vintage flash to a digital SLR as I certainly would be. Or shoot a test roll and see what effect changing the shutter speed will have in a situation that you would actually want to shoot.

Thanks AJG! Yeah I feel more confident to try it out with the Retina than I would with a DSLR.

Another TLR camera which often gets overlooked due to the 620 film format is the Kodak Reflex II. It's a 40s-50s era camera, but has very sharp 80mm Anastar lenses and the overall construction of the camera is great. Very solid! I believe it was also the first TLR to use a fresnel viewing screen and its quite bright! I don't bother respooling the film onto 620 spools, I just trim the plastic flanges of the 120 roll down so they are flush and then smooth them out a bit and they fit perfectly in the camera. It's a very minor inconvenience IMO to be able to use this gem of a camera. Just grab yourself some metal 620 take up spools and you're in business.

Kodak Reflex II - Matt's Classic Cameras

Kodak Reflex II

The point I'm trying to make is that learning the ins and outs of shutter speed, aperture etc. can be done a lot quicker and easier using a digital camera, and it doesn't have to be a high end one, as long as it has manual exposure mode.

Some folks just getting into photography may not want to learn techniques using a digital camera. They might just want to start with a manual film camera.

Few pics from the Kodak Chevron camera. Ektar 100 film

Those are asking prices, not completed sales. I think there are a lot of sellers on eBay that expect buyers to have more money than brains and common sense.

I dunno about that. Just search completed sales for the Contax T3. There are at least 12 that recently sold for $1,500 +. That's crazy if you ask me.