The Film Retriever

Fujica is probably the camera make you’ve heard good things about but you never bothered looking on that auction site for one. Fujicas were quite popular at their time, they were offering a good mixture of quality and low price backed up by a beautiful line of Fujinon lenses. Fujica was the camera-making section of Fuji industries, starting the manufacturing of cameras in 1948 with the Six I BS – a 6X6 folder and continued to the very popular for the 50’s-60’s rangefinder sector before introducing the Fujica ST 701 in the early seventies. The ST X01/X05 series became popular as they were carrying the famous M42 mount, giving the photographer a vast range of lens choices, from the world famous Takumars to the FSU lenses. By the late 70’s, things had moved on, the offerings from Nikon/Canon/Minolta/Olympus/ Pentax meant that the M42 mount was outdated so Fujica presented its own mount, the X-Fujinon mount which they sadly discontinued 5 years later when they pulled the SLR ...

I think that I've reached a point that I'm done with Prakticas. This is the fourth one that develops an erratic shutter AFTER I've put a film in and honestly I cannot afford spending money on cameras that die a film later. Unfortunately I cannot recommend you buying one, I think the much cheaper Zenits are better build or you can pay a bit more and get a nice Fujica or Chinon.

Some say that cameras are nothing but a light-tight box; it is the lens that counts. I disagree with that, cameras are very sophisticated devices that operate with accuracy and can expand to suit our needs. The pinhole cameras teach us that a lens is not necessary to take a picture but on the other hand, the lenses made today produce pictures that astound us with their clarity and level of detail they record. New, CAD aided programs offer new designs and “better” – if we can say - lenses. Or not? I think it is only fair to make a post about the lenses I’ve used so far and compare them with each other to give a sense of scale. I am basing my scoring on usability, personal preference and most important performance for the price.  I will limit this post only to the prime lenses I use; maybe at some point I will start adding the plasticy zoom lenses.. we’ll see.   Prakticar 50 f/1.8 I start with this lens because it is historically the first prime I ever use...