The Film Retriever

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...

The cameras in question  A few weeks ago, I came across the May 1994 Popular Photography issue where they had a brilliant idea. They compared the matrix metering of 17 AF SLRs to see how they were performing. I thought - why don't I do something similar myself and see what comes out of it? Instead of 17, I chose the 7 most used AF SLRs I have. Most of them I have them for years and I have shot countless rolls with them. I know they all work well and as a matter of fact, I have been very happy with them. But how different results produce when you compare one to another? So, here is what I did. The test. Instead of using 7 films for it, I thought I would use the cameras to take a reading and then transfer it to a DSLR (Canon EOS 10D). Then recompose to make sure it fits exactly the frame as it was when the reading was taken (walk back and forth a bit). The main problem I encountered revolved around the fast changing light that morning, some of the pictures I took on the ...

This is a review of the Nikon F70. This is the second F70 that managed to find it's way to my camera collection, I bought the previous one in 2015 and used it for a couple of years before selling it. Back then I was only interested in Pro models so any other camera was buy-to-sell to further enable my camera collection. This one came up as a suggestion online, no-one bid for it so I got it for £9.99 plus £3 delivery (!). It seems people do not love these cameras, we'll try to speculate some reasons for that. In order to write this review I had to go through some Nikon brochures, the March 1995 issue of Praktical Photography, the Popular Photography review of 1995 and preview of 1994 and the review of the Greek magazine "Φωτογραφος". I also shot a couple of films over the last 3 months. * A bit of historical context The Nikon F70 production started in 1994 with the first samples appearing on the shelves in early 1995. The overall press reception was quite ...