The Film Retriever

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...

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 ...