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Forum: Photographic Industry and Professionals
10-23-2023, 11:57 AM
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Long ago I fairly frequently repaired cameras for my friends. (My ancient hands don't even work well for changing a watch battery these days...) I remember going inside a IIIF and an M3, and they were really beautiful. (A great many of the cameras I had to work on were ones that had been dropped into the lakes near here. For some a challenge, for others just a stop on the way to the trash.)
There was an article in one of the photo magazines about two approaches to building consumer cameras. One was called the mouse-trap school, the other the Leica school. It came down to design: A Leica would not work reliably unless it WAS built that well, the design demanded it. A Kodak Instamatic was designed so it could work even if not built that well. All a matter of where you put your resources...
BobW
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Forum: General Photography
10-13-2023, 10:42 AM
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In the digital world, the Fuji X100V would qualify as would the Ricoh GR series. Fuji can't make X100V fast enough. They are extremely popular and the little Ricoh cameras are very popular for street photography, a niche that has found film cameras with 35mm focal lengths to be very desirable.
You are looking at early 1960s fixed lens cameras without looking at the reason for why they went away. They didn't go away because they weren't any good, they went away because of marketing.
Consumers switched from them to SLR cameras because SLRs won the marketing game. Manufacturers decided they were the future (better spin off sales), flogged them to the public as the next big thing and stopped making good fixed lens cameras, thereby forcing people into SLRs whether they wanted to go that way or not.
And it stuck, with the consequential demise of the high end fixed lens camera.
They also saw a void in the market with easy to use inexpensive cameras that would serve the less discerning masses, and so the inexpensive compact was born.
We get a lot of people here saying that they know more than the manufacturer about what is marketable and what isn't. Interestingly, none of them run camera companies and so don't have access to the market research that these companies do.
Some 40 years ago, I was inadvertently part of the Kodak marketing research that led to the APS film format, something that would have taken off if Kodak hadn't taken 13 years from the time they were interviewing lab managers to when they introduced it. By the time APS came along digital was hot on it's heels and within 8 years of it's introduction film was effectively dead after a few years in intensive care.
What Pentax needs to do with the film project is front burner it and get cameras on the shelves before the window of opportunity closes on them. If they spend too much time in product development they risk having the shine come off the second coming of film and will have made the same mistake Kodak made with APS.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
07-31-2023, 09:31 PM
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There may be some sort of switch that senses the back is closed that you could hold/tape down. The problem is, with a camera with built in film winder it's going to want to run the motor to advance the film. There is also probably a film sensor to deal with. For cameras that cannot be tested with a light source/photo detector I use a digital video camera to record shutter operation from the front. I use a Sony RX100v at 960 frames per second. You probably could make do with 240 or 480 fps. Maybe even 120, but you probably would have to shoot several shutter releases to catch shutter operation.
The ZX-5n, being both newer than your H3V and SP-F and having an electronically controlled shutter, is likely to be much more accurate. The most likely problem would be the leading and trailing curtains running at different speeds causing exposure to vary across the frame (called cupping.) That's going to be hard to see using a light source/photodetector anyway. Might be best to just shoot some film and see how it comes out.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
08-01-2023, 08:16 AM
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There is a switch on the left side of the camera (viewed from the back) tucked in where the film door latches. Poke around in there with a toothpick or something pokey until you hear it click out of the way. You should see the button that opens the film door move up into the closed position. The camera now thinks that the film door is closed and you can fire the shutter. Sorry, I don't have a pic of the exact position. I can post one this evening when I get home if you are still having trouble.
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