What were they thinking?

Retro looks in cameras are nothing new. Olympus replicated the looks of its (excellent) film era OM SLRs in the OM-D MFT models and Panasonic and Fuji have had a good go at the Leica M rangefinder in their GX7 and X100, respectively. These latter two models added better digital sensors and took away bulk, cost and weight, so there really was something new being said there.

But Nikon’s attempt, the Df, which seeks either to copy the film era F3 or the FM/FE/FA, depending on which you wax more poetic about, looks like an exercise in futility. And failure.

Here are the reasons why:

• A ridiculous $2,750 asking price for the body only
• Bigger than the FM/FE/FA by a substantial margin
• The D4’s 16mp sensor at a D800 price. Heck, you can get the 24mp sensor in the D600/610 for a great deal less
• A comically cluttered look from any angle – the sell being that this is a return to ‘pure photography’
• Claims that pre-Ai lenses can be used – ummm, if you like metering stopped down, that is – oops, forgot to mention that ….
• No movie mode. Duh!

As for the ‘pure photography’ crap, I count 32 switches and dials on this comedy hour special. For comparison, I get to 26 on my D3x, hardly a ‘simple’ camera.

Clutter galore.

More clutter and complexity.

Ah, you say, but look at the technological sophistication.

Uh huh. Like:

• A low sync speed metal focal plane shutter
• A very noisy flapping mirror
• A mid-20th century pentaprism glass hunk
• A tired focusing device – one unsuited to MF ‘purity’
• No interchangeable focusing screens
• A rubber plug doubling as a (not so) built-in eyepiece shutter for those ‘purist’ night shots on a tripod
• No ten pin accessory connector socket

A fool and his money may be easily parted, but I rather doubt Nikon will see too many of either when it comes to this abomination – fools or money. It used to be doctors and dentists who collected toys like this; now a few will sell to Silicon Valley geeks and their pictures will be every bit as good as those of the medical set which came before.

Avoid this shoddy business.

All you need to know is here:

My Yelp.com review:

Nice talk is worth exactly what it costs. Zilch. Pleasant weekend, my rear.

No, there’s no click-through here.

A comedic touch.

Proving once again that it’s impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the (camera) consumer, Leica gives us this doorstop:

For your $2,850 you get a modest range 28-70mm (FFE) fixed zoom with the splendid maximum aperture of f/6.4 for your APS-C sensor at the long end. f/6.4!

And no viewfinder!

Add one for $200 (Olympus VF-2) or $500 (Leica rebranded Olympus VF-2) and you have a mediocre EVF which still works poorly in bright sun.

For that sort of money you can get a premium Canon or Nikon APS-C body with a stellar zoom lens with a real aperture, and money left over. A semi-pro quality Nikon D7100 will run you $1,200. Add a no less stellar 24-120mm fixed f/4 zoom for a further $1,300 and you still have $350 left compared to this toy from Leica.

Or, with MFT sensors now competitive with APS-C, an Olympus OMD will cost you $925 and $250 for a 28-84mm compact zoom.

Amazing what people will pay for a red dot.

Zeiss Ikon’s finest.

Zeiss’s finest rangefinder 35mm film camera, the Contax II, was manufactured in Germany between 1936 and 1941. I was lucky to borrow a used one from a camera store I worked in during my student days, along with the contemporary Leica IIIc, the Contax with the 50mm Sonnar, the Leica with the 50mm Summar. The Sonnar was far the better lens at f/2 and f/2.8.

The cameras were night and day. One version has it that Zeiss was determined to best the Leica with a more modern design. Another maintains that they had to change the design dramatically to avoid patent infringement. One thing is certain. The Zeiss business dwarfed that of Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar in wealth and breadth, so starting with a blank sheet of paper on the drawing board was no big deal, given Zeiss’s resources.

What emerged was a camera of quite exceptional elegance. Compare with the Leica IIIC:

Where the Leica is all knobs and dials and busyness, the Contax is an integrated whole. The Leica is an unfinished engineer’s design, the Contax a Bauhaus aetheticist’s dream. Not until 1954, when Leitz released the greatest 35mm rangefinder design in history, the Leica M3, was anything comparable to the Contax made.

What prompts this piece is my recent article on The Mexican Suitcase and mention therein of the great war photographer Robert Capa. For when Capa landed on Omaha Beach on D Day in 1944, he was armed with two Contax II cameras and a Rolleiflex. The few images which survived from that reportage are among the most famous war pictures made:

Robert Capa’s unforgettable image of the American
Normandy landing on D Day.

The Leica user of that time had to focus through a rangefinder eyepiece, then change his view to the (awful) viewfinder, using a separate eyepiece. Slow shutter speeds had to be set on the small front dial, after setting the upper dial to a specific index. When the Leica’s shutter was released the upper dial rotated – interfere with it and your exposure would be off. The Leica’s lens had to be screwed in. You had no choice but to rewind the film when your 36 exposures were made.

The Contax changed all that. The rangefinder was brilliantly integrated as a central patch in the viewfinder, one eyepiece for both. All the shutter speeds from 1/2 to 1/1250th (!) of a second were on one large click-stopped dial concentric with the wind-on knob, with the release button elegantly integrated into the center. The clunky ‘lift-turn-drop’ miniscule main shutter speed dial of the Leica with its irregularly spaced settings, which could only be set accurately with the film advanced, was history. Interchangeable film cassettes could be loaded in both the feed and receiving bays, requiring no rewinding. Where the Leica used a horizontally running shutter made of rubberized cloth, the Contax ingeniously opted for a vertically running assembly of interlocking metal slats which permitted faster flash synchronization speeds, though factory flash synch was not added until the post-war Contax IIa/IIIa were released. Copal of Japan were to adapt the design to many Japanese cameras much later.

The Contax II shutter. Click the image for
Mike Elek’s excellent Contax repair site.

You can get a good sense of the quality of the camera’s engineering from Mike Elek’s site.

The lens used a bayonet mount – actually a dual bayonet mount. Shorter lenses fit in the inner mount focused with the small geared wheel in front of the wind-on knob, whereas longer, bulkier ones used the external bayonet claws you can see above, focused with a regular focus collar on the lens. Canon later used the same idea in its post-war Canon 7, where the external mount was used exclusively for its extraordinary f/0.95 50mm optic. The inner Leica screw thread mount used by Canon was too small to accommodate the huge f/0.95 lens.

A modern analogy is apposite. When the iPhone was released in July, 2007 it was a Contax II to every predecessor’s Leica IIIc. Function and form were one.

Only when the Leica M3 came along were all these modern features (save the dual bayonet mount – one bayonet sufficed) incorporated by Wetzlar, who also greatly improved the rangefinder by adding sharply defined edges to the rangefinder patch, suspended finder frames for three focal lengths, and an ingenious parallax compensation mechanism. That was 18 years and a world war later.

While some aver that the shutter in the Contax was more fragile, as the horizontal slats were connected with thin silk tapes which age poorly, contemporary users had no complaints, nor did I when I used this wonderful camera.

Contax simultaneously released the Contax III which added a non-coupled selenium cell exposure meter on the top plate, deemed revolutionary at the time, but in practice it ruined the lovely lines of the model II’s body.

After the war Zeiss released the IIa/IIIa pairing, much the same but maybe even better made. The basic body design was retained through the Contarex SLR range whose complexity and high manufacturing cost did a lot to bankrupt the Zeiss Ikon of old. Those Contarexes retained the dual reloadable cassette chambers, and updated the advance knob with a lever, but the design heritage was obvious for all to see. When the greatest film SLR of all time, the Nikon F, was released many years later that same dual locking/removable baseplate design was retained. It was not ideal – you sometimes wanted a third hand to change film – but it was solid, simple and robust. Compare that to the film baseplate slot-loading mechanism in every film Leica through the last model, the M7, and you will be in no doubt which is the superior system.

Amazingly, Cosina released the Voigtländer R2C in recent years sporting a Contax lens mount along with TTL metering, even if the body was an ugly duckling. The Zeiss aficionado could find new use for his classic Zeiss Ikon lenses:

A handful of modern lenses was also released in the classic Contax mount and adapters are available to use old Voigtländer Prominent lenses – here’s the Prominent’s 50mm f/1.5 Nokton in a handsome semi-matte chrome finish on a Contax II body:

The Contax worked fine for Capa and no one reading this can lay claim to being a better photographer – or a more courageous one. The Contax II is one of the great classics of the 35mm rangefinder camera world.

Update July 203: I just added a Contax IIa, the post-war version, to my home theater display.

The ultimate medium format film SLR.

Franke & Heidecke had been making twin lens reflex medium format film cameras since 1920 until they decided to compete with Hasselblad with an SLR medium format design named the SLX in 1976. This quickly got a reputation as one awfully unreliable piece of hardware with common failures including the film drive motor and the lens aperture motor. Hasselblad was not about to be replaced as the fashionistas’ camera of choice, a reputation earned over several decades by the Swedish camera maker using Zeiss lenses.

But Rollei kept banging away and by the time the Rolleiflex 6003 Professional was introduced in 1996, the product was close to perfection. One later iteration saw the addition of AF, hardly an essential in this type of body and dictating replacement of all those expensive optics, but the 6003 Pro improved on the dated Hasselblad’s design in every way possible.

The design was Bauhaus modern, the oversized controls on the body and lenses perfectly conceived and the detachable handgrip, which could lock at various angles, was a piece of design genius. It made a clunky studio camera into a fully fledged street operator, albeit at the price of a lot of dollars and avoirdupois. This camera was heavy!

The images below are of (and by) the one I owned.

Where the Hasselblad was created in a mechanical age, the Rollei was clearly a child of the electronic era. Unlike with the Hasselblad, the Rollei had motorized film advance (available for extra on special Hasselblad models, and still as clunky as it gets), an instant return mirror where the Hasselblad had none, and far superior ergonomics. It was an integrated whole, needing no add-on gadgets. The accurate TTL meter was built-in, you could opt for aperture-priority, shutter-priority or fully automatic program modes, single or continuous shooting, spot or average metering and even TTL flash metering on the 6008 variant. There was a full bright red LED status readout of all the vital signs at the base of the finder window and once you attached the 45 degree prism the outfit would really sing at a comfortable chest/eye level. There were two shutter releases – green in the above images – the one perfectly placed for use with the handgrip. Hand held use for close-ups was easy with a couple of extension tubes which conveyed all the information needed to the camera and lens using electrical contacts. Even the aperture was electronically controlled by a linear motor – advanced in its day, now stock in most DSLR lenses.

Hasselblad’s claimed advantage was that all the lenses for the 500C and later bodies had in-lens leaf shutters, the long-lived Synchro-Compur. This purportedly added to the cost of lenses, not that shutterless Rollei/Zeiss lenses seemed any cheaper. Rollei countered by adding selected lenses with leaf shutters, which have the advantage that they can be sync’d with flash at any speed, unlike focal plane shutters, allowing for easier balancing of ambient light and motion blur. Eventually Schneider also offered lenses for the Rollei, just as it did for the Hasselblad, making for a very large lens selection indeed for both marques. If you could afford them, that is. These optics were insanely expensive, not helped by a perenially strong Deutschemark and an overfed and overpaid German worker. Nothing changes.

I used mine with a Nikon Coolscan 8000 film scanner which would take a few minutes to render a 4000 dpi scan for a theoretical definition of 81mp, but in practice with all the variables, the vagaries of film and scanner and so on, it looks more like 10mp on my display using Lightroom.

And that was the Rollei’s undoing. When the 12mp Canon 5D was released as the first full frame affordable DSLR, a first look at the results doomed the Rollei to eBay. The Canon had superior resolution and color rendering, the lenses were outstanding and much faster, the body was a fraction of the bulk and cost of the Rollei and if you wanted 3+ fps, no problemo. But, best of all, there was no need to waste precious time scanning and then retouching the spots and scratches conferred by the film lab. And that was after first waiting to get the film back.

But my, my, what a well designed and fun to use machine this Rollei was. It always reminded me of what Lord Chesterfield said of sex. “The pleasure momentary, one’s position ridiculous and the cost damnable”. I sold my outfit before the penny dropped in the mass market that MF film was dead. A year or two after sale the price of used Rollei MF SLR gear had dropped 70% and Rollei had gone bust. Such is technological obsolescence.

It mystifies me why anyone would buy one today when a like-priced Nikon D600, with lenses a fraction of the cost, will leave the Rollei in the dust in every regard. Further, spares are unavailable and qualified technicians who can fix the electronics are even rarer. Finally, be prepared to procure replacement cells and soldering skills when the dated NiCd battery gives up the ghost. But as a design and display exercise, it’s as good as medium format film cameras ever got.

If you really must get into MF film gear SLRs, I highly recommend a Hasselblad. The bodies are mechanical, aesthetically beautiful to hold and behold, easily fixed and abundantly available. Their dated features are more than compensated by the ease of repair and the ready availability of spares and technicians, even if Lord Chesterfield’s pricing mechanism comes to mind.

As for all you hear about the plasticity and rendering and blah, blah, blah of medium format film, forget it. Pure claptrap engaged in by those with too large an investment in dead tech, now worthless.