I got a nice gift yesterday, a semi-antique Konica Autoreflex TC with two Konica Hexanon AR lenses: a 40mm/1.8, and a 135mm/3.5. Naturally, I cocked the shutter, pretended I had inserted a film and fired away. Gulp. Were the cameras really that noisy in those days (actually, not too long ago)? Mirror up - clonk - mirror down - clonk.
Since I have not had the time to find an adapter Konica AR → Fuji-X yet, I just held the 40mm lens in front of my X-T1, to take a test shot of a lens polishing cloth. Looks promising
Mamiya 645, sha-ka-LONK!
I find this shockingly (pun inteded) satisfying. The mamiya is built like a tank. While I can appreciate how silent my X-T1 is, the hefty all-mechanical motionmachine…which will probably still work in 200years if maintained properly…it just is in a different league of awesome. Fuji did the right thing by bringing back dials. The haptic feedback gets you attached to the product. And yes they could improve on those dials a lot! But still, my Canon 40D is lifeless in comparison.
'bout as big as one, also. I’d never seen one in person until a couple of years ago, the fellow who bought my view cameras had recently acquired one, and I was shocked - all the pictures I’d ever seen of them over the years never gave me a clue regarding their actual size.
You ain’t heard nothing until you have heard the thunderclap noise of my “Marion & Co Tropical Reflex 5x4”. As the name says, this SLR (single lens reflex) takes 5x4 sheet film. It has a focal-plane shutter and a huge mirror that bounces up and down, projecting an image to a horizontal ground-glass screen. It doesn’t have a pentaprism.
I was having some of the same thoughts when I tried my old Minolta SR-1 a while ago. It’s heavy, pure metal, and totally mechanical. No electronics whatsoever. And the sound of those springs and levers at work is just therapeutic, I think.
I found an adapter in Berlin. Ought to land in southern Sweden any day now.
Will be great fun to test the semi-antique 40mm lens on a modern camera body.
Can’t confirm it just like that. It has a lot of shake because that mirror is rather large. But it also has a manual mirror lockup, so…that deals with it if you need it to be vibration-free.
If you can, shoot with it!
Therapeutic, gorgeous look from the large image, gorgeous look from the analog negative, the process is SO different from klicking a digital image, you can still do alot to the image after scanning…no downsides if you have the time for it.
At last the Konica AR → Fuji-X adapter found its way to me.
Strange route it took, though: I ordered it on eBay from Berlin,
five (!) days later it was dispatched from Amazon’s Germany Branch
– which is located in Poland – who shipped it to Denmark to be
forwarded to Sweden.
The adapter quality is good; luckily it has none of that wobble
that was present in the Canon EOS adapters I bought a few years ago.
This is one of the first test shots, using the 40mm Hexanon lens on an
X-T1 body…
Can’t confirm it just like that. It has a lot of shake because that mirror is rather large. But it also has a manual mirror lockup, so…that deals with it if you need it to be vibration-free.