The Film Retriever

  Small and beautiful  Ah, another short review of a camera - following the first impressions of shooting the Olympus 35ED, I decided to put a film to another newcomer in my collection - the Pentax MV-1. I found this camera online, came with the 50f/2 but had signs of battery corrosion although seller argued that it works well. For £14 plus delivery (£17 in total) I decided to take the risk and honestly I have been lucky. The MV-1 is part of the budget series of ME clones that Pentax offered during the late 1970s. There is the plain MV and the later MG also, all with some incremental improvements over the previous model but never quite up to ME/ME-Super level. Personally, I had much better luck with the plain ME rather than the ME-Super: almost every ME-Super I came across was malfunctioning in some way or another. The top is rather Spartan. And so is the viewfinder. In the case of MV-1 Vs ME both the cameras have similar dimensions but differ greatly in terms of features: the...

  The venerable Minolta XE-7  This is a review of the Minolta XE-7. I base this review on the few weeks that it has been with me and two rolls of film that I shot with it. I know I have too many cameras when I have no space to put them in the cupboard. Running out of cupboard space has led me to sell the Olympus IS-1000, a Praktica LLC and the two Minolta SRT-101/100x, together with a few lenses in an attempt to make some space. Soon after, an Olympus 35 ED and a Pentax MV-1 came along which meant that space was limited again. I am trying to be very disciplined and stay away from online shops, car boot sales and charity shops but when this came along, I just couldn't resist. This XE-7 is a charity shop find - they were initially asking for £30 but someone commented that it was not working so they let me have it for £10. The switch was stuck to the Off position, the mirror was up and you couldn't advance the film or press the shutter button.  Having read the manual, I knew...

The little olympus in question  I got this camera as a giveaway something like 7/8 years ago. It had a cloudy viewfinder, fungus on the lens and the camera would be erratic in terms of exposure. Upon arrival I decided that it was too problematic to deal with and it ended up residing in a box with broken cameras (for spare parts) for years. Recently, a friend contacted me to tell me that he found an Olympus 35 ED and whether I was interested in it - thinking that I have nothing to lose, I decided to take apart my 35 ED and see if I can fix it - if that didn't work, well, I'll have another one soon. Olympus produced many nice fixed lens rangefinders from the mid-1960s up until the end of the 1970s. I am not going to go into details as I'm not very knowledgeable about each of those models. What I do know is that the 35ED was a budget model, full auto, aiming to the amateurs who did not want to bother learning the basics of exposure. The camera is equipped with a reliable Seiko...

Pocket Rocket  A bit of an oddball this one - being a folder and a medium format camera, it wouldn't strike me as something that I would be immediately interested in. I am pretty pleased with the Rolleicord I have and in general I am not shooting too many 120 films nowadays but for £10, being described as working well and with a clean Solinar - I just couldn't resist. So, as far as I can tell, my Agfa Isolette II comes from the mid-to-late 1950s. I am not sure of exact dates and honestly, Agfa doesn't come across to me as a company which would meticulously record serial numbers and dates, but you can get a rough idea by looking on the top of the camera: if your Isolette II has a screw in the middle of the wind knob or a depth of field scale on the left, they were made before 1955. Both of these features vanish at around 1955 and the top looks plane like mine with a (useless) ISO reminder. I wish they had kept the depth of field scale. Agfa Isolettes are best known for the 4...