[TwoUptons]

I'm not entirely sure this is the right place for this thread, but since Ricoh owns Pentax now, here it goes.
And I'm not sure if this was robust enough for a real review if there's ever a place for that to happen...

I picked up a Ricoh 35 Flex from America's favorite charity auction site for overpriced K1000s.

It was labelled as a Ricoh Fleek, which is incorrect and odd, and the camera is just as odd...

It is a fixed-lens (Ricoh 50mm f2.8) autoexposure SLR with no battery. Instead, it has an array of cells on the front of the prism where one normally expects the manufacturer's name.
Imagine any of the bazillion inexpensive rangefinders from the late-1950s or early 1960s, from companies like Petri, Minolta, etc. Only bigger...

And instead of a faded rangefinder window, you peek through the viewfinder and find a split-image circle surrounded by micro-prisms - maybe I got the SE version
Pop open the back door and there's a naked mirror back -- the shutter is in front of it.

Shooting with it is pretty strange, with 1/30 or so as slow as it goes on its own, but it will also go up to 1/500 I think.
Mine has a meter that pretty consistently underexposes, but that may have been the old film. Flash synch is shot, too, so no flash for me (and no shoe in any case), and the mirror occasionally needs some help to come back down (but the shutter fires fine so no film is ruined).

But the lens wants to be sharp, and is in the right light, but it's not anything that will cause a sudden internet surge in interest to dismantle old Ricohs.
Between the old film and what is probably an extremely simple lens, it makes for a neat vintage look, which makes sense from a 55 year old camera...
And the SLR nature of the camera means closeup filters are very viable, which is better than my Petri.

In any event, here are a couple of faded photos from some out of date Fuji 400...


Slow shutter on a cloudy evening. It pans nicely. Next time, I'll get her to run in front of an older car...



With a cheap Tiffen closeup filter (#4?) that fogged a little bit because of the humidity. No WR here... In the full resolution image, there was more detail than I was expecting...

-Eric