The Film Retriever

Another charity shop find that cost me as little as £5, proves the point that if I am such a lucky guy when it comes to how to spend my lunch money! By the late 50's, the rangefinder design was delivering the goods to all major camera manufacturers. It was easy and simple to implement, the know-how was around for almost 20 years now and people seemed to love the combination of relatively small size and decent optics. This demand in camera manufacturing gave the all-green for almost all camera manufacturers to produce the upper class, high quality rangefinders with fast, fixed lenses. In April 1959, Nikon released the legendary F which challenged the rangefinder design but it wasn't until the mid-sixtes that the professional photographers were persuaded about the virtues of the SLR design. That fast changing environment gave birth to a series of innovations in camera design and Konishiroku Konica did not sit on their hands. With the Auto-S, Konika produced th...

Up until a couple of weeks ago, i was leading a photographically quiet life. Last summer, in an downsize crisis, i decided to sell all the cameras I am not using any more and keep my favourite four that I enjoy taking pictures with. So from all those cameras reviewed in this blog, I only kept the Canon EOS 5, the Minolta 9xi, the Minolta XD-7 and the Leica. I was quite happy with my choice and thought i don't need any more cameras. Up until last week.... A knock on the door and I was surprised to see my next door neighbour standing on my doorstep and greeting me with an old camera bag. He told me that he knows that i use old cameras and wondered whether i would like to have his old camera. Without thinking too much about it, i accepted the gift thanking him for his kindness. You can imagine my surprise when i opened the bag only to find out that there was a Pentax MX in there. Did i need another camera? Yes I did. For those who have already read my review...

With cameras of the classic status like the Pentax K-1000, it is always difficult to write a review. There are loads and loads of websites that host reviews of this excellent machine as there are also thousands of K-1000 users that have done their first steps in photography with theses cameras. The psychological factor of having used these cameras for years and years makes every review of them seem fragmented, inaccurate or sometimes unfair. With the introduction of the iconic Olympus OM-1 back in the early 70's, Pentax seemed to be caught up in a dilemma. Apparently the M42 mount was starting to become outdated so there was a genuine need for an introduction of a new mount but what Pentax was trying to figure out was whether they should continue the production based on the long tried and tested spotmatic design (i.e. well build, decent sized cameras) or go down the OM-1 route of small durable cameras for the professionals. Their gut reaction was wi...

Ahh.. what a beautifully made all manual SLR from Yashica. Everything made out of metal and glass, the Yashica FX-2 feels like a robust piece of machine. Heavy and - I dare to say - elegant, this is a quality offer from the early-mid seventies, a camera that was (IMO) just as good as its bigger sister's siblings (Contax) in the advanced consumer market of that time. Yashica sold a bucketful of these and the FX series continued with the FX-3, FX-3 super, FX-7, FX-8, FX-103 and FX-D. The FX line was the lower grade cameras while the FR was more aimed towards the enthusiastic amateurs. If you wanted more than that, then you had to consider the Contax line of cameras. But as i said, despite being a lower grade camera, this is a fantastic offer. Fit and finish is of high standards and the viewfinder is in par with other cameras of that era. It carries the Y/C lens mount which means that every Carl Zeiss lens from Contax could mount and work perfectly well with this cam...

 Another camera that can be found littering car boot sales and charity shops, the EOS 500 was one of those cameras that I never thought i would end up buying mostly due to their prices going around £15-£20 which I wasn't sure I wanted to pay. I had already the EOS 300V which is a newer camera and it didn't seem to me that the EOS 500 could satisfy any user's need. Got this one for £2.50 and it is in great condition though... what the hell, i usually spend this amount of money for a sandwich and coke.   The EOS 500 was the very successful successor of the already very successful EOS 1000FN, a consumer grade camera that placed Canon on the top of the sales in the very lucrative category of consumers AF SLRs. The EOS 1000FN was almost revolutionary back at its time if you consider its small dimensions (which are not very small if you see it today) and it sold like hot cross buns on Great Friday before it was replaced by the EOS 500 that i am ...

As I've said to a previous post, I always had the impression that the Nikon L35AF was performing just as well as the Yashica T4/T5 and was costing only 1/10 of it's price. I never had though both cameras at the same time to put them to a test. That was until a month ago when I came across a Yashica T5. I thought I could try to compare the two cameras and see if my gut feeling is right. The test Now, let's think of the limitations of a comparison test like this. My idea was to load the Yashica T5 with a Kodak Tri-X, shoot three pictures, remove it put it on the Nikon, take exactly the same 3 pics and then remove it and put it on my Zenit 12XP and shoot the same three pics with the Takumar 35 f/2. No proper resolution test would be ever complete without the mandatory newspapers-hanging-on-walls test. Picture of the setting.  The cameras where mounted on tripod for this shots and hand held for the shots of the neighbour's roof. Shoo...

Those who have read already my review on the Yashica T4, then this review has nothing more to add. The Yashica T5 is pretty much a T4 with some aesthetic changes and the addition of a waist level viewfinder. Other than that, everything else remains the same. More importantly, the lens remains the same Carl Zeiss Tessar T* 35mm f/3.5. Now, having had 8 cameras of Yashica's T-series ( two T3's, three T4's, one T5 and two T-Zoom's) I can write my overall impression of using these cameras. For me, the T3 cameras where not up there with the rest of the series. Picture quality-wise the T3's were in the same league with the T-zoom (high praise for the T-zoom really). The ones to go for are the T4/T5 ones.They feel like a real improvement over the T3. T-Zoom is a nice compact but you need to have fast films and sunshine to appreciate the lens' performance. With two of my T4 samples i had problems around inconsistent focusing which completely annihi...

Now... what is wrong with the picture on the left? You guessed it right. Newer SMC Takumars SHOULD NOT be mounted on Zenits. Why? The extra pin that controls the Auto/Manual switch gets stuck on the screw holes on the mount. If you did this mistake -like i did - then you have two options. a) You force the  lens to unscrew bending the pin and damaging the lens or b) unscrew the whole thing and reach the pin from the inside. In my case, the lens is a Super Takumar 35mm f/2. Other lenses will of course be different to dismantle. Now.... ************************* Please read ******************** Since in this bad world, there are people who try to make a living out of suing others, please read this carefully. I am not a technician and neither do I claim to be one. If you decide to follow the guide below, you do it at your own risk and I will assume no responsibility if you damage your lens. You are a big boy/girl to decide for your self. If you think you cannot do it, then don't...

I didn't really need a Minolta XD-7 but I did want one. Having heard and read so many good things about it, i thought i should go through that auction site and see what is available. Ten minutes later and £28 less, there i had it, an immaculate XD-7 with a new leatherette that no one wanted to buy !!! The XD-7 is a fantastic camera that does not hide its professional aspirations. Althought not meant to compete in the professional grade arena (Minolta had the XM for that role) you could see this camera as the professional sibling of the X-700 - a camera which i really love - or see the X-700 as a scale down version of the XD-7 (if that help better). So what is different? First of all the shutter. In the XD-7 we find a Seiko MFC shutter instead of the more simple (but equally reliable?) cloth shutter of the X-700. The mirror box is also different, shock and noise absorbers are employed that makes the XD-7 more quiet than the X-700 (the difference is not huge bu...

Back in my teen years, I didn't know much about Chinon. The only model I knew was the CP-9AF and my limited knowledge on it was that it was a cheap alternative AF camera to the more prestigious Nikon/Canon/Minolta's. I never really bothered learning about Chinons, what was the point anyway - Nikon and Canons were producing much better cameras, right? Wrong. What i found out after joining photography forums is that almost all Chinons are fantastic cameras, much better than your average SLR's, with certain models competing directly with offers from the big fives (Nikon/Canon/Minolta/Olympus/ Pentax) but never really achieved any sort of collectible status. One of these cameras is the Chinon CG-5. This camera was produced in 1983 and it was set to compete with cameras such as the Minolta X-700, the Canon AE-1 Programme, Pentax ME-Super and P30 and maybe (or maybe not) the Nikons (FE/FE2). In the heart of the CG-5 we find the Seiko MFC shutter which is found ...

Those who read regularly my blog, will probably have figure out by now that i am not a point & shoot fanatic. I have sold all of my compact cameras to further invest in SLR cameras. So when i came across this little camera, i knew that it was a buy-to-sell buy to finance my next SLR adventure. The seller told me that it works fine, the price was right, so camera and money swapped hands quickly. The T-Zoom ( or T4 Zoom in America), is Kyocera's fifth incarnation of the T-series cameras, all well known to the photographic world for the beautiful Carl Zeiss lenses that they carry. With this model, Yashica pushed the concept one step further, offering a zoom range between 28mm to 70mm. The lens bears Zeiss's famous T* coating which means that we should expect high quality results from this little beauty. Comparing it with Yashica's T4 lens, the lens on the T-Zoom is a full stop slower at 28mm reaching a gloomy f/8 at 70mm. Although this might sound pretty...