The Film Retriever

The old lady who sold me this camera said that it was her daughter's and she hadn't used it at all. I believed her as the camera seems to be in mint condition. The wind lever is so smooth to operate, and the body clean and shinny.This was mostly a compulsive buy, i saw it in good condition and the price she was asking was right, so i said "why not". It is a really good camera and i wouldn't hesitate to recommend it as a first time rangefinder. The viewfinder is a bit dark but the focusing patch is quite clear to see and easy to operate. A cloth shutter with speed ranges of 1 sec to 1/500 in a bit unusual arrangement. The lens on this camera is a very nice Industar-61, f/2.8 to f/16, coated and very sharp. It also works on my Leica IIc. A nice feature of the Fed-4 is the lack of light seals. It uses the old good Leica drop in loading ( * Correction 31/8/2010 - Drop in loading??? I have no idea what i was thinking when i was writing it, the whole back is removable i...

I came across this cute little camera in a car boot sale. After a hard bargain, my wife bought it for £4. Matt Denton has a great website where you can find some more info about this camera. I never knew that Ricoh was making rangefinders in the 70's. It just looked so cute and the size was right so for £4 i couldn't go wrong. After i got the results back from the lab, i was blown away from the quality of the pictures this camera can take. The camera offers a fully manual and a speed preferred automation. That is quite convenient if you think that most compact rangefinders of that time offered full automatic (Konica C35) or shutter preferred mode (Yashica). A 1.3v PX675 mercury cell powers the CdS lightmeter which is reasonably accurate. Since the PX675 has been long discontinued, i use a 1.5v SR44 battery which requires to compensate with the ASA dial (expose the 400ASA film as 320ASA) for the difference in voltage. The rangefinder patch is nice and visible. On the...