Sears 35rf

I figure I've talked about the high end so I suppose I should talk about the low end as well.

This is the Sears 35rf, possibly from the late-70s or early-80s, but I'm not really too certain about that.  It's a store-brand clone of the Ricoh 35rf which I understand is a simplified version of the more nicely constructed Ricoh 500G, but the lenses used in all three cameras are the same.

With a 40mm f/2.8 lens this is no Canonet QL17, but I found this camera at a thrift store for $4 which included the working Sears brand flash.  Made mostly from stamped steel and plastic, this little camera certainly feels...um...inexpensive, but operationally, there's not much to complain about and it 's much lighter than a QL17.  Unlike the Canonet the light meter still functions when you're shooting manually, but there is also a shutter priority mode in which the camera indicates via match-needle the aperture being selected.  Fortunately the camera uses a standard 1.5V alkaline battery which is easy to come by.

The rangefinder patch is on the dim side, unsurprising given the inexpensive nature of the camera, but it's at least reasonably accurate when you can see it.  The focus throw on the lens is fairly short so there's not much use for terribly accurate focusing anyway, and with a maximum f/2.8 aperture you're not going to be getting super shallow depth of field to begin with.  The brightlines are also kind of difficult to see in dim lighting, but they're not really that accurate anyway so you're not loosing out on much.  The lens isn't bad, at least up to compact standards, but it's nothing all that special either.  The ASA rating only goes up to 800, so if you were wanting to push some HP5 to 1600 or shoot some TMZ3200 to compensate for the slowish aperture you'll have to deduct a stop or two from the indicated value.

All of this sounds like I'm pretty negative on the camera, but I'm really not.  No, the rangefinder experience is not up to Leica standards--does anyone honestly expect that from these pocket rangefinders--but it's perfectly usable and probably preferable to your basic AF 1980s compact cameras.  In fact, what so impressed me about this camera, was that in something smaller than a Walkman (the sort that plays cassettes rather than MP3s), and probably cheaper too, you had a camera that gave you all the manual control that you could expect from a much larger and more expensive SLR type camera.  Yeah it was cheaply made, but it was a cheap camera.

Anyway, for awhile when I was in college this was my go to travel camera and it rode along everyday in my bag, and made a couple trips to Chicago and St. Louis with me.  I was never unhappy with it, but ultimately I replaced it with an Olympus Stylus Epic mostly for the built-in flash.

Examples:

Leica M2

Well I figured since I've got Leica's on the brain, I'd might as well get it out of my system.

So this is my lovely 1958 Leica M2 and the equally lovely 2008 Carl Zeiss T* Planar 50mm f/2.0 ZM.  On top you will notice the later model MR-4 Leica-Meter.

A few years ago, I had this massive camera collection with one conspicuous omission:  I had no serious rangefinders.  Sure I had a couple of Canonets and some Soviet-built LTM copies, and some other consumer grade rangefinders, but nothing...dare I say...professional.  So I decided, gosh darn it, that I was just going to do it and go right for the top and get a Leica.  I certainly spent a good deal of time considering alternatives:  Konica Hexar RF, Contax G2, Voigtlander Bessa, Canon Model 7.  But nothing other than a Leica was going to be a Leica.

So after checking around and spending a lot of time going through the used market, I determined that the M2 was the best buy at the time, and the lower magnification viewfinder allowed the use of a 35mm lens better than an M3 did and was considerably cheaper than an M4.  Of course the M2 has no built in light meter, but the MR-4 Leica-Meter was actually fairly inexpensive and worked far better than I ever expected it to.  Sure you have to manually reset the frame counter and it's not as quick to load and rewind as some of the later models, but I don't think there's a prettier M-body except maybe for the MP.

The body is really like no other film camera that I've ever used.  Compact, light, quiet, extremely well built, but still elegant.  I used to own a few Canon F-1s and they were massively heavy and felt like solid bricks of metal, but if the Leica was a fine blade, the Canons were cudgels; both deadly weapons for sure, but obviously of different character.

Using the M2 is really effortless in a way that I didn't expect considering it's age and relative awkwardness, but compared to say the M8 that I use most of the time now, the M2 just gets out of the way.  I'm not really sure if it's the character of film versus digital capture, but once I've shot a photo with the M2 I'm looking for the next one, not thinking about whether I should check the histogram or not.

Lens selection is a whole different ball-game in Leica land.  The Leica lenses are perfection, no two ways about it.  And there's a lot of people out there that would say that it's a waste to buy a Leica body and not use Leica lenses on it.  I call baloney on that.  There's no one else that makes a body like a Leica, maybe a Zeiss-Ikon or a Voigtlander, and I have picked up a Bessa R2a, but when I go out shooting film it's usually the M2 that goes along.  If you enjoy rangefinder shooting, but you're not wealthy enough to buy top-tier lenses, does that mean you should stick to your SLRs and hope that someday you're flushed with cash?  No, of course not, get the body that enables you to shoot the way you want, and then get the lenses you can afford.

So once I had the body I set about looking for lenses.  I temporarily used the old Jupiter-8 50mm f/2.0 that I had on the M2 with an adapter, buy I found that I couldn't quite get infinity focus with that combo.  It was a pretty nice lens for what it was though, and it helped me settle on getting a 50/2.0 of some sort as my first lens.  I narrowed the search down to a used Leitz 50mm f/2.0 Summicron-M, and I suspected that I'd go with the Dual-Range Summicron as it was the most affordable.  But after looking long and hard at the Zeiss ZM line of lenses, I realized I could get a brand new 50mm f/2.0 Planar for the same price that the Dual-Range Summicrons were going for used, and it had been acknowledged to be nearly as good a performer as the current Summicron.  I figured it'd be good enough for me, and I wouldn't have to mess around looking for just the right used lens.  So I sprung for the Zeiss, and my word, it's a beautiful lens.

Examples (not all with the Zeiss):

Leica M8

Looks like I've gone Leica mad!

If you've read anything about the Leica M8 on the internet you've undoubtedly heard about all of its "issues," so I won't bother going over them to any great extent, but I will add my thoughts on them.  

The shutter is louder than a film Leica, no doubt about it, but it's not really loud either.  I'd agree with what some people have said about the shutter making a different kind of noise, but honestly it's as loud as pretty much any DSLR these days.  Of course, there are a couple of advantages to the noisier shutter in the M8 versus the quieter one in the M9, M8.2 and so-called M8.1, such as 1/8000th second top shutter speed and 1/250th flash sync.  In a professional-grade camera, I really appreciate the higher flash sync, so I'll put up with a slightly noisier--but not really noisy--shutter.  

One thing that really bothers me:  why no PC-sync port?!  I know a lot of people say, "oh, well a M-rangefinder is about natural light shooting," but that's stupid.  Photography is about controlling light, whether it's existing or not, and sometimes I'd like to be able to plug some studio lights into the camera and still be able to use the shoe for additional viewfinders.  I can't believe the M9 still doesn't have a PC-sync port.

The camera itself is really rather unobtrusive--it's smallish and it looks like something you dug out of your grandpa's closet--unless someone happens to recognize it as a Leica.  It's sort of funny to watch people process why an "antique" camera like this has an LCD on the back, and inevitably they ask, "Is this digital?"  I've always wondered what they'd think if I said no.

I sort of have mixed feelings about removing the bottom plate to change the battery and the SD card, but it's not too much trouble; I know some people think it's a bother, but it is what it is.  Battery life is as you've heard: on the low side.  I usually take my M8 on vacation with me and I'm always careful to charge the battery every night; I'd like to just carry an extra battery pack, but they're stupidly pricey.  I'd guess about 400 shots to a charge when you're not doing a lot of image review.

It has a 1.33x crop factor compared to 35mm film, and that's a little annoying, but to me since it's a rangefinder and you're not actually looking through the lens it seems easier to me to adjust to than the 1.5x or 1.6x common to most DSLRs.  I would still appreciate a full frame sensor, but the M9 is just more than I can honestly justify spending on a camera (and sometimes the M8 is as well).  I sold my Voigtlander Color-Skopar 35mm f/2.5 PII and replaced it with their Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 MC, and I'm fairly happy with it as a basic "normal" lens, and it wasn't too outrageously expensive.

The general conclusion on the internet is that the M8 is too noisy regarding higher ISO settings.  And I'd maybe agree, but while it's no D700 or 5D Mark II, it's also an improvement over most APS-C DSLRs out there.  Noise aside, I've worked with files from a lot of different cameras and the M8 files have a crispness that I haven't been able to find in other cameras, and I'd wager that the lack of any anti-alias filter in the camera is the reason.  I've compared the M8 against the Canon 7D, and I'd conclude that, in terms of resolution, the M8 is a match for the 7D.  A camera like the 5D Mark II has an advantage at large print sizes, but I think up to 11x14 or so the M8 is a strong contender.

IR/UV sensitivity is an issue, and the whole black-into-magenta thing shows up pretty easily.  Leica sent me two filters to block it, but even with coded lenses the whole cyan corner shift is still a bit of an issue at times.  I've coded my lenses with markers, but my Zeiss and Leica lenses rub off too easily.  Voigtlander lenses have a nice groove in the mount to prevent the self-coding from wearing off, but I tend to favor Zeiss lenses, and I find myself recoding them every four or five lens changes.  But having an infrared sensitive camera is actually pretty nice, and a simple Hoya R72 visible light blocking filter is all that's needed to take advantage of it.  The best thing is that unlike on an SLR, focusing (and metering even!) is as easy as ever.

I actually sold off nearly all of my Canon kit in order to purchase more M-mount lenses.  I thought I'd keep the Canon stuff for the things that a rangefinder isn't suitable for, but it turned out that for what I was shooting a rangefinder could do 90% of it.  One thing that turned out to be pretty neat was that when I put my Canon ST-E2 wireless controller on my M8, I found out that if I used the 580EX II Speedlights set in manual wireless mode I could fire them off with a maximum sync-speed of 1/90th second!  I just had to make sure that the M8 wasn't set to second curtain sync or it'd miss the flash, but I was surprised that this worked at all.  In the end though, the 580s were sold and I've picked up some Nikon SB-24s that work great with the M8.

Anyway,  I really like the M8, but it's not a camera for everyone, and there's times that I really miss having a DSLR.  Having such an anachronistic camera is always going to be a bit of a struggle unless you're either wealthy enough to not really care about it, or have a specific enough shooting style that you can make the most of it.  I wouldn't really say that I'm either of those things, and I'd probably be better suited with a camera like Sony's new NEX-7, but every now and then everything comes together correctly and the M8 is the greatest camera I've ever used.

Examples (not necessarily of greatness):

Voigtlander Color-Skopar 35mm f/2.5 PII

Hey, another M-Mount lens!

This is the Voigtlander Color-Skopar 35mm f/2.5 PII; what a nicely built and compact lens!

I had wanted to maybe pick up an older Leitz Summaron 35mm f/2.8 with the goggles, but I just couldn't ever seem to find one in decent shape for a reasonable amount.  Naturally this isn't a Leitz lens, but as a third party alternative I'm very impressed with it.  It's not quite to the same level of build as the Zeiss 50/2.0 ZM Planar that I also have, but it's about right for the cost.

After having used this lens for awhile, I would agree with everything that's normally said about it. It's nice and contrasty, it's fairly sharp even wide open, it has a surprisingly nice out of focus rendering, and it's compact.  It also doesn't really flare that badly, but, as a warning, when it does it is quite ugly and really has the possibility to ruin a shot so I'd recommend getting a hood with it; although, that then reduces the compactness of the lens.

I actually wound up selling this lens after having it for a couple of years, thinking that the 35mm focal length wasn't one I was using much, and boy did I regret it.  I eventually replaced it with the Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm  f/1.4 MC, which is another lens that I like quite a bit, but something about that Skopar still sort of tugs at me.  I think in retrospect, it's easily the best value in the Voigtlander line-up, and if you're shooting mostly out doors in sufficient light, this is the lens for you; don't get suckered by lusting after those ultra-high-speed lenses.  More modest lenses, when done correctly, are some of the best lenses you can buy, and this one is a gem.

Examples:

Plustek OpticFilm 7500i SE

Well with all these posts about film cameras it'd only make sense if I mentioned a film scanner wouldn't it?

I was in the market for a dedicated film scanner to replace the Canoscan 8600F that I had been using for scanning 35mm (I just didn't think a flatbed scanner was doing my Leica justice). The Nikon Coolscan V was my obvious first choice and is still probably a better, if more expensive, option. Unfortunately it is a now discontinued product with no manufacturer support, and worse, Nikon never felt the need to write 64-bit drivers for it (luckily for Coolscan owners SilverFast continues to support it).

After searching around for something in my price range I happened upon the Plustek 7500i, and initially it looked promising. I found a couple reviews online for it, and while the usable resolution seems to really only be about 4000dpi instead of the 7200dpi that they advertise, 4000dpi was still what the Coolscan V offered and seemed like plenty for 35mm. The Dmax is reported to be about 3.8 and not the Coolscan's 4.2, but considering that I had been working with a flatbed, I figured I could live with the difference.

The scanner comes with SilverFast's software version 6.5, which I find a little quirky but fairly full featured. The iSRD dust reduction hardware leaves a little to be desired, and I'm finding my old negatives to be far dustier and far more scratched than I had previously been aware of. Cleaning your negatives beforehand is always the best policy anyway. High res scans take awhile to complete, especially if you turn on multi-scanning or dynamic range optimization. I typically use the multi-scan option as it helps eliminate some of the noise that the scanner generates itself, but I've been surprised by how relatively little shadow noise is present in even a single-pass scan.

The scans I've been able to get with this little machine are very detailed and very sharp. I barely need to sharpen the images at all for most purposes. Comparing the Plustek to the Canoscan, the images from the newer scanner are noticeably better, and even after optimizing sharpening a clear advantage still shows in the Plustek scans, this holds true even at lower resolution settings. If you do want your scans sharpened, I'd recommend turning off the scanner's sharpening options as it tends to overemphasize the grain in an image; you can do a much better job in Photoshop. My usual scanning routine is to run USM at a radius of 0.3 pixels at 240 to 330 percent and follow that with another round of USM at a radius of 40 to 60 pixels at 10 to 15 percent (threshold is 0 in both cases).

I can't say that the Plustek 7500i matches the Nikon Coolscan V because I've never been fortunate enough to work with the latter, but I can say is that I don't think there's much more detail left in a typical 35mm negative that the 7500i isn't able to capture. D-Max, scan time, and many other things might be better on the Coolscan V, but I'm pretty sure that the 7500i is capable of meeting and exceeding my current needs for 35mm use, and I'm quite happy with it. One thing to keep in mind is that when we all shot film and printed on traditional photopaper, most people placed a limit to quality 35mm enlargement at about an 8x10 inch sized print, so don't expect your old Kodak Max 800 negatives to be scannable and printable as crystal clear wall sized poster images.

Here's a few examples with different films, but unfortunately Blogger messes up the high resolution files on here, so these are obviously rescaled.

Fuji Velvia 50, Leica M2, Voigtlander 35mm f/2.5

Kodak E200, Leica M2, Zeiss 50mm f/2.0 Planar

Ilford PanF+, Leica M2, Zeiss 50mm f/2.0 Planar

Fujipress 400, Canon EOS 630, Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM

Leitz Elmarit-M 135mm f/2.8

Ooo, what an exotic looking setup!

Leitz Elmarit-M 135mm f/2.8 from about 1984 mounted on a 1958 Leica M2 with MR-4 Leica-Meter.

It would seem that despite being a fairly popular and relatively affordable lens, there's not a whole lot of good information out there on the internet about it.  There's a lot of people that say it's way too large and that the slower aperture Leitz lenses are a lot better (which I don't doubt), but that's about all I ever seem to see anyone say about it.

The longer the lens, the more difficult it is to focus on a rangefinder.  Since we're dealing with a lens here that's both relatively fast aperture and fairly long, Leitz compensated for some of the increased difficulty in focusing by building in a set of magnifying goggles.  These goggles turn the 90mm brightline into a 135mm view by giving the viewfinder an extra 1.4x magnification and effectively enhances the accuracy of the rangefinder.  It does darken the viewfinder image a little and I think it also increases the tendency of the rangefinder spot to flare out, but all in all, it's a intriguing solution.

The lens is obviously kind of large, but not really any more so than any other 135mm lens like this would be.  This particular version of the lens was the last version (sometimes denoted by the option for E55 filters as opposed to the earlier Series 7?) and was optically the same as the R-series lens that Leitz made for the now discontinued R-system of SLRs.  There's definitely some heft to it; I'd say that with it mounted to the M2 the whole kit is maybe five pounds, so yeah, it's not exactly lightweight, but what do you really expect from such a solidly built package?  

The person I bought this lens from said that he used it on an Epson RD-1, but I don't see how that's possible as the goggles don't line up with the rangefinder windows, and I can say for certain that the lens does not work with the Voigtlander Bessa series of rangefinders.  It might work with the Konica Hexar RF, but I've never played with one to know what the differences are, and my guess is that it won't work with the new Zeiss Ikon M-mount rangefinder either.  It does, however, work fine on the newer digital-Ms, but on the M8 (at least on an unmodified M8 anyway) the frame lines aren't 100% accurate, but they are usable.

Functionality aside, the lens is quite sharp, no surprise there, but what did surprise me is how prone it is to flare.  Any sufficiently bright light source can lead to a dramatic veiling flare that doesn't necessarily ruin a photo, but does reduce contrast significantly.  I suppose this might be highly desirable in a portrait lens, and certainly 135mm makes for a great portrait focal length, but this still surprised me a bit.  As I said, the lens is very sharp (not uncommon for a 135mm) and doesn't really need to be stopped down to improve.  If you've got one of these lenses and you think it's not quite up to snuff, you might want to calibrate it--sharpness really depends on critical focus.  Fortunately you can do this yourself by loosening (but not removing) the back of the goggles and adjusting the set screws near the goggles' objectives.

All in all, a very nice lens.

Examples:

Olympus E-410

Wow, not a Canon, not from the 1980s, and a digital camera!

I lifted this photo from ephotozine.com since I don't actually own this camera, but I did have the opportunity to use one awhile ago and enjoyed quite a bit really.

It's a fun little camera to use; so tiny, it feels a lot like using the Konica FT-1 Motor that I wrote about the other day. That little kit lens is sharp sharp sharp, no two ways about it; a great value compared to most other kit lenses you'll find these days. And honestly, despite what you'll hear, noise isn't as big of a deal as you might have heard on these Olympus cameras; yes, there's more than you'll find on most of the wonderful cameras currently on the market today, but if you've got a photo that doesn't succeed because of noise, it probably wasn't that successful of a photo to begin with.

So what don't I like about it? Few fixed focal length lenses. Not a big deal from an image quality standpoint; the new Oly zooms are fantastic and fairly fast aperture.  But the E-410's such a small camera, it would be great to have some ultra compact pancake-style fixed focal length lenses to go with it (like some of Pentax's Limited lenses).

I'm also not sold on the whole 4:3rds thing. When they first started out with 4:3rds they said it'd be better from the standpoint of cropping, but in this day and age I don't feel that I need to be bound to the old standard 4:3rd-ish print ratio, and I happen to prefer the more common, and wider, 2:3rd ratio that you find on most other DSLRs. Actually, I'd love to have an SLR with a 16:9 ratio...well maybe, maybe not.  Of course, as Olympus was quick to point out, 4:3rds fit computer screens and TVs much better, so way to be forward thinking Olympus and catch on to the fact that digital display was the way of the future, too bad you didn't think forward enough to realize that 16:9 was the new standard.

So okay, to sum it up. Great camera, great lenses, great image quality, but not really what I look for in a camera.  With today's ILC cameras eating up the market for large sensor compact cameras, I think it'd be safe to say that the E-410 and it's successors were the only 4:3rds bodies to really, and I mean REALLY, deliver on the promise of smaller sensors allowing for smaller bodies.

Example:

Shot at ISO 800 with the Zuiko Digital 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6