Category Archives: Hardware

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That first ‘roll’

Canon 5D, Leica

First impressions – the Canon EOS 5D in use

Living in central coastal California brings with it many benefits. No big city problems, space to breathe, no pollution and beautiful countryside all around in what is rapidly becoming the Napa Valley of the south.

So it did not take much effort to take the EOS 5D for a short field trip along twisty Santa Rosa Creek Road from Highway 46 all the way down to Cambria.

First, I have to keep reminding myself that this camera was purchased to replace my wonderful medium format gear which, in turn reflected my split thinking about equipment. I love rangefinders, hence the Mamiya 6 three lens outfit (small, fast, quiet). I also like control over variables, thus the Rollei 6003 (big, heavy and noisy). So it’s a tad silly to compare the size and weight of the EOS 5D with the Leica M3, but instructive nonetheless, as both are “35mm” cameras.

With the 24-105mm IS “L” lens the 5D weighs in at just under four pounds, replete with garish strap announcing “CANON EOS DIGITAL” in large woven letters. That will have to go. Not only is it an exercise in poor taste, it cannot be shortened enough to keep the camera at chest height, where it belongs. I have a proper strap on order from Upstrap.com.

The lens hood will be the second thing to go – the worst possible way of advertising “photographer”. I’ll check for flare and just let the UV filter take care of protection if flare is not an issue.

Finally, I wish the body was chrome, not black, but that is not an option. The last thing on earth I want to be mistaken for is a professional photographer and black cameras seem to scream “pro”. Imagine the three worst things you can say when asked what you do at a party: 1. I work for the IRS. 2. I am a proctologist. 3. I am a professional photographer. Ugh! All guaranteed to clear the room.

A rational 35mm comparison is with the Leica M3, 21mm, 35mm, 50mm and 90mm lenses. That gives a similar focal length range. I don’t have my 35mm as it’s out on loan, so I threw in the Bessa T body where my 21mm usually resides, and the weight comes out to a pound more. Swap the Bessa body for the 35mm and there’s nothing to choose. You trade the convenience of a zoom on the Canon for some of the fastest compact optics made – the 21mm is f/2.8, the others all f/2, compared with the f/4 of the 24-105mm. Now the Canon zoom lens very cleverly gains three stops through the use of the Image Stabilizer technology, but that’s another story.

Here’s the film gear on the scale.

Finally, overall bulk and looks. Ugh! As you can see the Canon is positively gargantuan next to the Leica – like the cuckoo placed parasitically in the poor warbler’s nest by its mother. Even without that ridiculous, poorly designed lens hood, it’s large. As for looks, the body is indistinguishable from any number of competing digital SLRs, meaning it’s largely an amorphous blob which screams “designed by computer”. It certainly will not feature in your dreams. Maybe in your nightmares?

This is not a camera for people with small hands. The controls on the lens are large in diameter and take some getting used to. The zoom ring is not as smooth as one might like, though the manual focus ring is very sweet. The dim viewfinder, compared with the Leica, is remarkably uncluttered, with data readouts below the picture. They are not at all distracting. Indeed, I rather struggled to see these in daylight. What is startling is the speed with which the autofocus works and, at least with my first snaps today, the automatic focusing seems spot on. There is no shutter lag. None. You can take a first pressure on the shutter release to lock focus and exposure and the feel of the release is so well engineered that it could not be improved on. While much softer than the Leica’s, which is surely the gold standard, I would venture to suggest it’s better, as there is less likelihood of camera shake.

I’m not a serial or bulk shooter so the three frames a second capability is of no use to me, other than it startled me this morning when I didn’t realize I had it on and took three pictures where only one was intended! 3 fps is fast. With no film to wind on, the camera is surprisingly quiet, not as quiet as the Leica, but the noise is largely devoid of metallic overtones, maybe owing to the plastic casing and well damped mirror. That makes it seem quiet. Clever. Well done Canon.

Ask me what the best engineered lenses I have used are and I would unhesitatingly reply Leica and Rollei 6×6, though early all metal Nikon lenses were also excellent when it comes to build quality. No compromises were made in the designs of these lenses as their cost and weight attest. Now this Canon pro-grade lens is a different kettle of fish. It seems very light for its massive bulk when you first pick it up. The general feel of quality is for all to see and, notably, there is absolutely no wobble in the moving parts or barrels, which I have never experienced with a zoom lens before. It doesn’t feel as if it could survive the next nuclear blast, unlike its German counterparts, but time will tell. It focuses to about one quarter life size fully extended. Good to have. The switches for auto/manual focus and for IS on/off on the side of the barrel cannot be moved by accident. At $1,250 it’s a bargain. Have you priced Leica glass recently?

To push things a bit I exposed a couple of shots at one stop down and ISO 200, depending on the noise-free nature of the large sensor to avoid “grain”. The 1/250th second exposure computes to 1/2,000 with IS, so camera motion is not an issue. That bears thinking about. Consider how much sharpness is gained from the miracle of reduced image blur which IS confers. 16x enlargements (meaning 16″ x 24″ from the full frame) were noise free and very sharp in the center. As good as medium format? Too early to say but my first reaction is very positive. I need to take some snaps with lots of fine filigree detail to answer that. If you are one of those photographers who likes resolution charts as purportedly objective measures well, you had better stop reading, because those will never be seen here. My interests in the functioning of camera tools is strictly empirical. Sharpness or resolution are like obscenity. I cannot define them but I know them when I see them.

The peacock’s head, from the center of the frame, is equivalent to a 30x enlargement. Here’s the original:

No image sharpening was used other than that provided by the 5D on the Standard setting. Clearly, this lens has potential. You can just see digital artifacts, bearing in mind this is an enormous enlargement. This was at 105mm, ISO 200, one stop down – f/5.6. Autofocus was used. Out of focus highlights are unobtrusive.

Click here and you can see a dozen pictures from this morning’s ramble, including the peacock original. None of these had any post-processing applied and, of course, file sizes were reduced to make loading speed acceptable. Some involve challenging lighting, confirming the exposure meter works well. I used the default Evaluative Metering, making no adjustments to the camera’s choices. These were all taken at the highest quality JPG setting which means files are some 6 megabytes in size, which compares favorably with some 150 megabytes for high quality scans from 120 medium format film. Stated differently, an older G4 Mac will have no problem loading these files in a few seconds. My commiserations is you use Windows.

I have yet to experiment with RAW which evidently yields a file twice the size of highest quality JPG. RAW should allow easy correction of lens barrel distortion and vignetting, so I suppose that’s the way to go.

I made a few 13″ x 19″ prints on my Epson ink jet after completing the above. Of these, more anon.

Pandora’s Box

Canon 5D

The Canon EOS 5D arrives

With so much in excess equipment sales proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I splashed out wildly and paid the nice people at B&H in New York $20 more for Second Day shipping to the Templeton estate. This wild act of rash spending saw the Canon EOS 5D and the 24-105mm Canon lens arrive yesterday evening, where Bertie the Border Terrier and I dutifully placed it on the south patio so that we might contemplate what wonders this Pandora’s Box might disclose. Further, it was the Cocktail Hour, and nothing short of a second Japanese attack interrupts that.

This was a mixture of fun, as we enjoyed the delicious anticipation of what was inside, yet no less a period of deep apprehension. Setting aside my recent use of an Olympus Digital POS (in case you are wondering, that stands for Point Or Shoot, because with that camera’s shutter lag you cannot have both), for the last 40 plus years I have been loading cameras with film and adjusting but three variables – shutter speed, aperture and focus, and most of the time these adjustments have been manual. Often, it should be added, with incantations to the exposure God, praying that I would be within four or five stops of the right settings.

Lest the reader wonders at my sense of apprehension, then it has to be pointed out that the camera in my hands for most of those forty plus years was a Leica M2 or M3. And because I know a good thing when I see my negatives, the lenses on those Leicas always said ‘Leitz, Wetzlar’ on the front. For all of Leica’s problems, they remain the standard against which to judge to this day. And what lenses. The distortion free 21mm Asph Elmarit. The ‘standard’ 35mm Asph Summicron. Any number of 50mm Summicrons. The ne plus ultra 90mm Apo Asph Summicron, perhaps the most perfect optic ever made. And finally, one of the very sharpest, the 135mm Apo Telyt, now winging its way back after a one year loan to a friend on the east coast. Throw in a couple of Telyts used on the idiotic Visoflex housing and you can see where my heart lies, optically speaking.

Before the great day arrived I had done a spot of studying and had procured a nice little Firewire card reader for the iMac; all this talk of plugging the camera into your computer strikes me as so much nonsense. Just remove the card and place it in the reader. Further, I had also learned that the swines in marketing at Macromedia/Adobe had ensured that Photoshop CS would not read RAW files from the 5D, so I had grudgingly upgraded to Photoshop CS2 which does. Unfortunately, the latest Adobe Camera RAW software is not backwards compatible with the earlier version of the application. I had also spent some time on Canon’s web site studying the interactive tutorials on the 5D and digital photography in general and found them useful and entertaining. Most importantly, they took out some of the apprehension I was suffering from the oncoming blizzard of knobs, dials and menu options.

Now Bertie’s take on this was, as usual, philosophical. “What have you got to lose?” he asked rhetorically. Heck, the gear in that box was free, after all, and you can always sell it for little loss if it’s not for you. By now the sun had almost set and the Martini glass, sadly drained, was now home to a lonely cocktail onion. So I gave the onion to Bert (we are dealing with a pretty sophisticated animal here) and set about the box, hoping to snap at least one picture before sunset. You know the sort of thing – ‘My first picture with my new toy on the day I received it arrived’.

So we opened the boxes up, stuck the lens on the body, popped in the battery (nice that they ship it partly charged), inserted a memory card and stuck our head out the front door. Notice the strict adherence to American Attention Span with regard to the instructions.

And this is what we saw:

Canon EOS 5D. Picture 0001.

Putting my money….

Canon 5D

….where my mouth is.

I have written quite a bit about the imminent demise of film in these columns. Now is the time of reckoning, where I make the move from my point-and-shoot-one-second-shutter-lag-digital to the real thing. My drivers are medium format quality without the bulk, full frame digital sensor, no shutter lag and the convenience of not having to process and scan film, in that order.

Let’s face it, if you want a full frame 35mm digital camera your choices are not great. Until a while back there were two from Kodak and one from Canon, all very expensive. Kodak, being the second worst run American company, just discontinued theirs, of course. That leaves only Canon, with a $7,000 very costly and very bulky offering. I cannot remember the model designation but it’s something like ‘2006 Model 15B we-just-upgraded-it-twice-this-month mega-digital something or other’.

Then, late last year, Canon capitalized on its lead with larger light sensors and released the EOS 5D for some $3,000. Now it may well be free with any purchase of two boxes of Corn Flakes two years hence, given the rate of depreciation of these digital wonders, but Canon’s exclusive offering makes it look positively cheap compared with the professional model. The smart people at the company priced it right – expensive enough that you can console yourself that it is a ‘professional’ camera, whatever that means, but cheap enough to attract a host of keen amateurs. Like me.

So I waited a while to let the initial bugs get sorted out, meanwhile pondering whether the sale of my medium format equipment should proceed immediately, given that film is unlikely to be available in this format for much longer. The value of this gear is important to me as I propose to make this whole change a zero cost affair. Enough with net equipment spending!

Now I’m a photographer and an American. That says when I list things on eBay I support the listings with the very best pictures, knowing that a good picture really is worth a thousand dollars. Forget words. Not American. So I spend the best part of a day with the Novatron studio flash, umbrellas, backdrops, you name it, and take revealing, detailed pictures of my wares. All on my little Olympus 5mp digital, the one with the one second shutter lag. All of this culminates in no fewer than eighteen listings on Fraud Central, excuse me eBay, the ultimate destination for sellers. Only America could conceive of a multi-billion dollar business where you can lie about your wares and be pretty much assured of free passage. Why so many auctions? Because history proves that you make more from breaking up sales into small parts. The ‘outfit for sale’ thing reduces your market and selling price.

Well, pretty much everything sold for top dollar and the household is now replete with packing boxes containing fine Rollei and Mamiya medium format equipment. It’s good to know that these superb tools are going to good homes and that UPS will make some money. I have $6,000 in the bank and B&H Photo Video in New York has a $6,000 order. And yes, that’s another $435 in sales taxes not paid to the thieves in Sacramento.

The first claim on these funds is my wife’s. I have long known that if you are to buy yourself a toy, budget 100% more than you plan to spend. That’s the cost of a face-saving gift for the wife and keeps things humming along smoothly on the marital front. And in case you still think this is money poorly spent, just take one look at the object of my affections and you will know otherwise:

The next time you will be reading this I should have the camera in my hands and a few shots to show for it.

So why the insistence on full frame and why not a Leica? First, I like my wide angle lenses to be wide angle. A 21mm which becomes a 35mm on any one of a number of digital SLRs out there is senseless. Secondly, I like differential focus. That 90mm on full frame is 55mm on crippled frame. Suddenly your portrait lens has added one stop’s worth depth of field. After over 40 years with 35mm, I know how the depth of field feels with all my lenses. I do not propose to relearn that. So that ends the full frame vs. crippled frame debate. Finally, I want medium format quality and basic physics tells me that’s easier to do with a large original (or sensor) than with a small one.

And what happened to waiting for Leica? Nothing would make me happier than simply moving all my superb Leica glass from the M2 and M3 rangefinders to a digital M. Well, I concluded a while back that the lack of entrepreneurial vision and capital at Leica means we will not see a digital M for many years and even then you would be paying $6,000+ for a crippled frame sensor. Sure, the excuses everyone makes against full frame sensors with wide angle lenses that place the rear element too close to the ‘film’ are well known. We are told by these Luddites that the light rays strike the sensor at too acute an angle, causing definition problems. The solution is simple, but it takes some genius at Canon to implement it. Cameras can electronically sense focal length – that’s why you can see the exact focal length at which you took a picture displayed in the EXIF metadata stored with your digital snap. So when the focal length gets short, have a small vacuum device bow the sensor backwards, thus flexing the edges to a perpendicular angle to incoming peripheral light rays. Hard you say? Is not Canon the company that gave us lens gyroscopes (Image Stabilization), eye controlled focus (the camera focuses where your eyeball is pointed), full frame sensors, lenses with diffraction gratings to cut bulk, and on and on? And vacuum backs intended to keep the film flat are as old as the earth. Well, what’s called for here is a vacuum back that distorts the film. And let me tell you, there is no way on earth that Leica has the capital or the distribution to develop and market that.

Now I’m not about to sell all my Leica gear. First, it is not dependent on the continued existence of film to retain its value, unlike all that medium format gear I just sold. There are any number of Leica equipment fetishists out there, many in a newly recovering Japanese economy, that value retention is simply not an issue. Second, I still enjoy using the M rangefinders and can see that continuing for a while at least. Third, maybe Voigtlander/Cosina will come out with a full frame version of their Epson RD-1. In which case the Leica bodies will move on to pay for the new digital body and those phenomenal lenses will get another lease on life. So it’s premature to sell this gear.

In the meanwhile, with the goal of learning a complex piece of new equipment and making it work for me, I have loaned my M2 and 35mm Aspherical Summicron to a friend for a year. That should focus the mind wonderfully. Mine and hers! And yes, I still have the M3 if I need a quick fix.

Hurry. It’s almost over.

Cameras

Don’t emulate the Poles in 1939

I can claim some authority in writing about the ostrich-like behavior of my noble Polish ancestors in 1939. You see, my ancestry goes back for more centuries than I care to admit in that most conquered, yet most proud, of nations. When I was growing up, I looked around, and once old enough to appreciate these things, I realized we were poor. Why so?

That was in London. Back in 1939 when the Stukas threatened and the Panzers loomed and the Polish army prepared to charge on horseback, my parents placed all their valuables in a safe in Warsaw. You might well question this asset diversification strategy when the most powerful, aggressive nation known to man was massing on Poland’s borders. I hold no rancor for my parents’ behavior. Hindsight tends to be perfect and if I could only get the Wall Street Journal a day or two early, place just a couple of hot trades, I would be writing this from my Gulfstream private jet. It happened. Get over it.

My parents, of course, were in deep denial. After all, how do you move 15,000 acres of some of the most beautiful land man has seen? Deep denial. Like modern users of film.

To get in the mood for this piece, I thought I would turn on an LP, for old times’ sake. They do sound good, we all know that. If you can disregard the scratches, the click and pops, the cleaning ritual and on and on. So I pulled an old Louis Armstrong number out and it’s playing as I write. There on the inner sleeve, forgotten, was a lovely note from my dear departed mother to herself. She wrote ‘od Tomeczka’, meaning it was from me. I had given her this LP on December 7, 1985.

So what has all this to do with photography?

Well, that little note on the inner sleeve of the 20 year old LP speaks to obsolescence every bit as much as film speaks to the sea change in photography. Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, it brought thoughts of the need for change flooding back to my brain.

Like most of us, I have been forced to change. LPs gave way to CDs. CDs eventually moved to the iPod, 300 discs in the space of a shirt pocket, fidelity uncompromised. The cathode ray tube gave way to the flat screen. VHS tapes moved on as DVDs came in. They must be due for obsolescence any time soon. How else are the electronics manufacturers going to stay alive?

And, like the aggressive German masses congregated on the border of my parents’ estate in September, 1939, that change is now rolling over the serious photographic world faster than we can begin to realize.

It started with the mass consumer. Easy prey for innovation, digital cameras were sprung on him seemingly overnight and, even if he still struggles to get the picture while squinting at the barely visible screen in broad daylight, the digital camera has become as de rigeur as the SUV. A staple of American life, meaning the rest of the world will follow in short order.

The professional press photographer got the idea three or four years ago when up-market SLRs started sporting acceptable definition and the city desk editor wanted to beat the competition with the latest picture of the celebrity of the day behaving badly. The studio and wedding professionals followed suit and Apple recently jumped on the bandwagon with software aimed solely at enhancing digital workflow with RAW files. It’s called Aperture. Some one third of the content in the leading Macintosh monthly, Macworld, is now dedicated to digital capture. Capture. That’s hip talk, I have learned, for snapping pictures.

The Art Photography set, however, held out, clutching their platinum prints to their troubled chests. Nothing can equal the quality of a darkroom print. Deep denial.

One second – I have to attend to my 80 year old technology and flip the LP after all of 20 minutes of playing time.

Well, I think the Art Photography set, while not wanting to admit it, is getting the idea. The last ball to fall.

I subscribe to a couple of top quality photo magazines. Strictly minority material. LensWork and View Camera. They showcase fine work and offer a good reading of the pulse of the market.

LensWork has a very high opinion of itself, right down to its small size masquerading as Art. The magazine has very high production values. Printing is fabulous (as it should be for so small a format), writing is excellent, the whole thing reeks of quality. Until a couple of issues ago they refused to accept ink jet prints for publication! Suddenly, seemingly 50% of their content is all digital – camera and print – and the equipment, which they invariably mention, is pretty much at the consumer end of the spectrum, meaning mid-range SLRs and the like. Nothing like market forces. Needless to add, content is strictly monochrome. They say it’s for aesthetic reasons, which means they cannot afford color with their miniscule print run. No matter. It’s a fine magazine whose content always makes you think. It’s going digital fast.

View Camera, on the other hand must have either some of the most dyslexic, or most stoned, proof readers in the world. It reminds me of that old leftie standby of English newspapers, The Guardian, known to one and all as The Grauniad. Beloved reading of faded academics in tired tweeds who think fondly of Stalin as a great liberator. An issue of either VC or TG without typos is like a US Congress without crooks. But once you get past this slovenliness, you find a fine magazine with a balanced mix of the photographic and the technical. I just received the current issue and what do I find? Articles on digital backs for 4”x5” cameras! Reminiscent , it is true, of Lord Chesterfield’s thoughts on sex – “The pleasure, momentary. One’s position, ridiculous. And the cost …. damnable.” Now you not only have to lug the camera, lenses and tripod, you need a laptop computer, back-up hard disks, cables and a very, very costly digital back. We are talking the cost of a new car here. Of course you save the weight of all those film holders. Great. And if you use a scanning back every picture takes many minutes to expose. Go on line to one of the advertisers selling scanning digital backs and you find a comparison of full frame 35mm digital (meaning Canon) with scanning 4”x5” backs. Now is that defensive or what?

Another article in Veer Pamela, sorry, View Camera, speaks to ULF. That’s Ultra Large Format to the ignorant, meaning people silly or strong enough to lug around 8”x10” cameras so they can make contact prints from the negatives, allowing them to be printed smaller than actual size in photography magazines. No, I’m not kidding. These poor photographers pool their meagre resources (all that’s left after their chiropractors’ fees) to convince Kodak, Ilford et al to make just one more batch of 8”x10” or 16”x20” film. Please. Humor us. Just one more time. The fact that Kodak and Ilford even bother confirms that they both deserve to go out of business. You want to own stock in a company engaging in this sort of trivial pursuit?

Denial. My parents were graduates of the art. These fellows are post-grads. The only difference is they are not risking their lives.

Aargh! The needle on that LP is stuck again, right in the middle of Basin Street Blues.

Cameras and aesthetic design

Cameras

Why are so few beautiful?

A friend kindly emailed me to alert me that a web chat board was offering a camera as a prize for the best picture taken in the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson. A worthy goal which will doubtless see some great work submitted.

Then I got to looking at the prize and was struck by how inexcusably ugly it was. Going by the name of the Zeiss Ikon ZM, there is no other way to describe this brick than in one simple word whose meaning needs no explanation: Ugly. I was going to preface the U word with a vulgarity describing part of the anatomy, the bit you sit on, but good taste prevailed. You get the idea.

Equipment, it seems to me, is merely a tool to do the job, so dwelling on it to excess is not productive. But this kind gesture on my friend’s part, who suggested I should submit some of my street snaps to the contest, got me thinking about the aesthetics of equipment, or more specifically, why so little in the way of camera gear is remotely attractive to look at.

So, like most photographers, I thought about the equipment I have owned, have borrowed and have lusted after. And in the interests of keeping this piece upbeat, I will concentrate on the cameras my eye remembers as beautiful, a work of art to hold and use, rather than all the others. And that is important to me. The old saw that has it that a poor worker blames his tools has it all wrong. It should be that a good worker uses beautiful tools. You think Michelangelo and his buddies didn’t discuss paints, brushes and canvases? Sure they did.

So I won’t refer to the brutish ugliness of the Nikon F, nor the brick like facade of the Mamiya RB67, nor even the Leicaflex SL – a face only a parent could love – in this brief Statement of Preferences. And I will most certainly not refer to the Kodak Ektra.

The post-WWII list is, sadly, a short one.

Headed, of course, by the chrome Leica M2. The most perfect blend of form and function ever designed. Color it black and you have nouveau riche – the young up-and-comer’s Porsche 911. Make it chrome and….aaahhh! Yes, this one is mine. With the wonderful 35mm Asph Summicron, no less.

But before that exemplar of taste and execution came along there was something equally fine to be had in the Zeiss Ikon Contax II and IIa. Forget the metered version with the ugly bump for the selenium cell meter. The un-metered camera was simply beautiful and aeons ahead of the cheesy looking screw thread Leicas of the time with their miserable viewfinders. A top hat compared to a cloth cap. Note the beautiful symmetry of the finder windows and the knobs, the gorgeous proportions of the body. You just must pick it up.

No Rolleiflex twin lens reflex can be left out of this reckoning with, perhaps the metered 3.5F at the pinnacle, the lens being just the right size for the body, something lost in the 2.8 variant. This one was mine until I gave it to a friend.

Whether it was because so many of the greats used it – Avedon, Penn, Beaton – or whether it had that secret something, call it balance, proportion, despite the rectangular shape, the Rollei is a beautiful camera.

Some miniature format cameras had that something called beauty too. Two of the best were the Tessina and the Minox. Regardless of their clandestine Cold War role in life, these two, especially the watch like Minox, had the secret ingredient. Have you ever opened a Minox for action? Try it. Sensuality redefined.


At the other end of the size spectrum, Linhof had what no American manufacturer could approach. A divine aesthetic sense. I won’t say anything about the Crown Graphic (heck! I own one) but just feast your eyes on this Super Technika.

Aaah!

Now that is a camera.

Now there’s a lot of German equipment permeating this piece. A nation that makes fine cameras and killing machines. But its eastern emulator, Japan, has had some pretty fine things to contribute to camera aesthetics too.

Take the fine line of early Canon SLRs. This is an FT. Note the finely sculpted controls and the general balance of the machine.

Olympus made a fine effort with the Pen F and even the bold gothic letter “F” seems to work well for this courageous, innovative design. A camera with a sweet, feminine grace, with a bold escutcheon. I loved mine. Wish I had never sold it.

They tried later to recapture the spirit of the Pen F with the OM1 but the magic spark was, alas, gone.

Then two really great Japanese designs come to mind. One very good – the Pentax MV/ME. Another camera with jeweled precision and an absolute joy to use. My ME Super fell apart but not before we had had the most wonderful relationship.

But their earlier Pentax Spotmatic was, after all, an impossible act to follow. Here was a camera that was a joy to behold. To hold. To use. Forget all that nonsense you read about the Japanese being imitators. Just take a glance at the raw sensuality of the advance lever. The most beautiful thing to ever grace a mass produced object. And note those angled “Zeiss” corners. The sincerest form of flattery is imitation. This was something that you would think should have set an example for the designers of the miserable looking Zeiss Ikon ZM, that execrable excresence passing for a camera. An example of which, sadly, they seem damnable unaware. As unaware as they are of their company’s glorious history of design.