The Film Retriever

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...

The gorgeous looking LTL I haven't even finished putting a film on one Praktica and suddenly another one pops up on my doorstep. Seriously though, it was an impulsive buy, I didn't need it - the seller wanted £35 and I offered £10, walking away reassured that he was going to reject my offer. Well, he didn't. Why did I want it ? How can you say no - even Juliette Binoche is using a black LTL in the "Unbearable lightness of being". If you scroll down my blog, you will find my review of its successor, the LTL3 (a camera for all intents and purposes similar to this) that I ended up selling as I was more interested in higher specified models. My impressions back then was that the LTL3 was a clunky camera to use and that you are better off buying a Nikon F6 if you want to enjoy film (...eyes rolling...🙄). A flock of M42s... As I said, to some extent the Praktica LTL is very similar to its successor- the LTL3. Size and ergonomics are the same, focusing screen is slightl...

The Praktica Super TL  I've said plenty of times on my blog that I am done with Prakticas but they always manage to find their way to my camera collection - well, Prakticas are not done with me it seems. This one was different though; it came with an early radioactive Pancolar 50f/1.8 and was for £10 so I grabbed the opportunity as fast as I could. A Praktica (BMS) was my first camera back in the early 90s, when the unification of Germany was fast approaching and Pentacon was selling off Prakticas at production cost. The seller told me back then that they were making profit on the cases and filters they were selling with them. So I suppose I wil always have a soft spot for Prakticas. A year ago I got hold of a Nova PL which seemed to work well but it came with a CZJ Tessar with dry lubricants so I sold it online. This Super TL was the successor to the Nova adding a light meter although it is quite quirky to use and quite frankly, I don't use it at all. I find it fu...

The venerable IS-1000  This is a review of the Olympus IS-1000, a camera that I came across in a charity shop and decided to buy. It was cheap, looked like it was working and came with the batteries inside - those batteries alone justify the £6 I paid for it. It also came with an original Olympus strap and the manual - the strap is a bit of a pain to put and remove and unfortunately it cannot be used in other Olympus cameras. One thing I noticed whilst going through my photography magazines from the 90s ("Φωτογραφος" magazine) is that the only mention of it was in this report of the PhotoKina in 1990. There are no test reviews and it doesn't even appear on the list of available cameras in the greek market in this 1991 issue of "Φωτογραφος". Following this, there is a shop advert from 1993 with the IS-2000 and IS-3000 - it looks like by that point, the IS-1000 was already discontinued. The 1990 PhotoKina announcement Looking through the Popular Photogra...

The gorgeous EOS-1N Cameras are indeed like buses on this blog. Only two cameras for the whole 2023 and three already for the 2024. Seriously though, I have been looking for a Canon EOS-1N for some time now, this came up for £70 and I bought it without second thought. I wanted to see how it compares to its more exotic variant, the Canon EOS-1N RS - a camera I never really warmed up to due to its size, clunkiness and noise. * Historical context I am not going to go into too much details about it, make sure you have a look at MIR's excellent write up on the Canon EOS-1N but the camera came out in November 1994 replacing the original Canon EOS-1 after a 5 year production run. Nikon had still the venerable F4 in production (went out 1 year before the original Canon EOS-1 and a year after the introduction of the new EOS-1n). The Canon EOS-1N became an instant hit with the pros who already found the Nikon F4 to be obsolete as an AF module. The Canon EOS-1N was ahead of the c...