The Mamiya Ruby is a nice looking rangefinder but it does not have a particularly well specified lens . It is a 48mm f2.8 Mamiya-Sekor comprised of 3 elements which is pretty much the minimum to offer any kind of correction but despite that it performs better than what the numbers suggest. The focus is incredibly smooth without a hint of play with a nice bright circular focus patch. The full range of focus is achieved through just under 180 degrees of turn at the front of the lens. All these characteristics together make a great focusing camera. The film advance is also a nice smooth motion with little resistance, just an agreeable continuous ratcheting sound that ends with a click. While it does have an uncoupled selenium light meter on the top plate I find its use unnecessary because the camera is completely manual and mechanical, you just select the shutter speed and aperture you want. I tend to take general measurements with a digital camera and use them as the basis for setting any manual film camera. Why not you really cant beat what is effectively a light meter with thousands of sampled points presented in a histogram. You should however take into account the difference between film and digital. With film it isn’t so necessary to protect highlights as it can be with digital. so a little over exposure is okay in fact underexposed colour negative film results in a ‘thin’ negative lacking in detail. Thin in this case refers to that characteristic of a negative looking transparent without an easy to see or use capture not its physical thickness. Back to the camera, Its fortunate that the front element of the lens is set quite deep because being from 1959 whatever lens coating it may have does little to help when unwanted light reaches the lens. If light from the side does hit the lens it flares like a rainbow or negatively effects the contrast or both. There is another updated version of this camera that has an f1.9 lens with 6 elements which I haven’t had a chance to try but does sound like a better match for the quality of the Ruby.
The film I used was an out of date roll of Kodak BW400CN which has been discontinued as of August 2014. The nice thing about this film was that you developed it in C41 colour chemistry. A person could always convert their colour scans to B&W after the fact if they felt they must but just couldn’t be bothered to actually shoot black and white film.
The Minolta AF-E was fitted with a 35mm f3.5 lens constructed with 4 elements. The lens looks ridiculously tiny in comparison to the rest of the camera which appears to have expanded in width from previous models to accommodated the flash and the automatic film winder. The Minolta AF-C is a similar camera and a better choice with its faster lens and smaller size Minolta AF-c. But for simplicity of use this camera is great and the fact that it is powered by inexpensive AA batteries is a real plus. With the auto focus, auto exposure and auto flash you need to be in the mindset of just pointing and shooting when using this camera but if that works for you then this is an inexpensive option.
I imagine that disposable film cameras will eventually disappear from the market but for now they are available new and…well you cant really say used, but found at thrift stores with unexposed film. Kodak was very proud of its camera recycling program claiming that 76-100% of the camera components were reused or recycled. I’m not sure where that stands now with the bankruptcy and restructuring and the comparative collapse of the film market. I can’t see that the volume of disposable cameras still being used warrant a full separate recycling program.
You could say that as a photography tool a disposable camera is limiting but maybe that’s the appeal. You can let go about worrying about the camera or any false notion that your going to produce some technically superior image and just enjoy the act of photography. A disposable camera gives you permission to have fun.
The Nikon FG might not be the professional model of Nikon from the mid 1980’s, in fact it isn’t even the top consumer model from that time that would be the FM2. It is a great little camera though and looks pretty good all the while too. It offers full program mode, aperture priority as well as metered manual exposure. When in manual mode one LED will blink showing the suggested shutter speed while a steady one will light showing the selected shutter speed. This makes it easy to see how far you are deviating from what the camera is metering. In addition it offers +-2 EV compensations in half steps as well as a backlight button. Its also much lighter and smaller than something like the Nikon F3 shedding over 200g and a pile of $. It is missing mirror lock up and depth of field preview but for general shooting, particularly when your on the move, those are unnecessary luxuries.
I used Kodak Portra 400 a film that uses Kodak’s T-Grain technology (Tabular Grain) which allows for a finer grain and greater sharpness for a given speed of film. This emulsion technology first appeared around the same time as the Nikon FG and revolutionized both colour and B&W film.
The Autoboy Luna sports a 28-70mm f5.6-7.8 lens comprised of 8 elements in 7 groups. Like many Canon point and shoots of the time it used their 3 point ‘Smart Autofocus’ system which I’ve found to be very reliable.
It offers shutter speeds of 2 seconds to 1/590 second and a minimum aperture of f32 and a max aperture of 5.6 at 28mm which allows it to cover a range of EV4 – 20 not too shabby for a point and shoot.
Its a nice little camera and mine obviously made its way from Japan after its purchase as it has Japanese markings as well as the date function.
This camera also goes by the name ‘Sure Shot Z70W’ however I prefer the similar but newer Canon Z90W for its greater focal length at the telephoto end and faster aperture at the wide end but this is a nice little camera from the mid 1990’s
One thing about one camera: The name Luna comes from the Moon shaped lens cover.
I loaded my trusty Pentax MZ6 with some Cinestill 800t film which I really like the look of particularly for the way it creates halos around bright lights against dark backgrounds. You can see my discussion around why that occurs here “Niagara at night” Coupling the fast film with some equally fast lenses such as the Vivitar 28mm f2.0 Close Focus allows me to forgo a tripod even when walking around at night.
The Fujica Flash Date is one of those mid to late 1970’s cameras that had incorporated auto exposure but was yet to see auto focus. Later similar models did have autofocus but this one uses simple zone focusing. The 38mm f2.8 lens is quite free of distortion especially when the exposure system stops the aperture down a little, but even wide open there is only a small amount of softness in the extreme corners of the image.
There is a sliding switch on the back of the camera with Japanese writing which I can no translate but its purpose appears to be to over-ride the slow shutter speed lock out so that you can trip the shutter even when its chosen a speed that is too slow to handhold.
Setting the date is done using three dials on the top plate of the camera (Day/Month/Year) When turned on the date is also briefly made visible in the viewfinder at the time of exposure.
(40 years of accumulated ‘stuff’ from the bottom of a camera bag is not very appealing to look at, I think I will give this camera a clean)
The results are often a slightly askew glowing numerals.
Some sample images from the Fujica Flash Date using expired Fujicolor 200
Somewhere along the line I acquired a roll of Kodak Advantix 400 B&W film. This film is not truly a black and white film but is processed in C41 colour chemistry. That’s perfect because that’s what I do. The film was likely long out of date and the result was quite thin negatives but I was able to tease enough out of them to make the whole endeavor worth while.
Discover your artistic capabilities. The elegant appeal of black-and-white photography continues to grow. Black-and-white film lends itself to helping you learn the graphic elements of an image—the form, texture, and contrast of a scene. This may take some practice. learning to “see” things in shades of gray. But once you do, you can capture a stunning palette of different moods, emotions, and possibilities. -Kodak
The camera I chose to use for this film was the Canon Elph Jr. with its 26mm four element f2.8 lens. Its hard to believe how small this camera is until you hold it, (weighing a paltry 125g) which is of course what the intention of APS film was despite its brief existence. The Elph Jr. also had a useful shutter range of 2 sec. to 1/800 sec.
looks like its purpose is to answer the question ‘What would happen if you just put a handstrap on an SLR lens and called it a camera?’ Its design seems to have more in common with a camcorder than a film camera but on the end of the lens is just the ordinary insides of a 35mm point and shoot. The lens is a 35-105mm f/2.8-6.6 (10 elements in 9 groups) which is quite a bit faster than other point and shoot zoom cameras. The flash is built into the cap and provides a nice large defuser unfortunately I didn’t get to test its capabilities. Another item that’s there but I didn’t test is the low angle viewfinder mostly because it seems to require putting your eye nearly to it which sort of defeats the purpose in my opinion.
Also at 645grams and given its size it doesn’t seem to offer much of an advantage over a small SLR with a kit lens but it sure does look different. Other interesting cameras in the same, build it around the lens, vein are the Minolta Freedom Zoom 105i and the much more conventional looking Olympus IS-10
While I’ve used the Yashica T4 previously I had not had an opportunity to use a T4 zoom which in reality does not bear many similarities. As soon as you go from a fixed focal length to a zoom lens they are going to be different animals. The T4 zoom has a 28-70mm f4.5 to f8.0 lens comprised of seven elements in six groups while the T4 had a 35mm f3.5 lens of four elements There are a few different things you can do with the controls one of which is to set the time and date and its format. This is done while the camera is off which I did not discover until I had imprinted most of my images with a completely erroneous value (That’s okay because I was really just making sure it even worked). Also when off you can alter the focus to spot by pressing the ‘main button’ until [S] is displayed on the LCD, this is reset once the camera is turned off again. When turned on though you can set exposure compensation of +1.5 or -1.5EV, suppress the flash and set a very interesting long exposure mode. This mode is entered by pressing the timer/remote button until [LT] is displayed on the LCD. Once this is done and the camera is secured, pressing the shutter button will result in a 2 second delay, to help reduce shake, followed by up to 120 seconds of exposure time which can be interrupted with a second shutter button press.
This first foray out of the way I’m going to feed the camera some better film and give it a more extensive try. The images that I did get suggest that the lens is a decent performer across the entire frame especially given that its a zoom.
