Wallace Koopmans Artlog

RICOH IMAGING COMPANY, LTD. is pleased to announce that, on November 27, 2019, it will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the foundation of Asahi Optical Joint Stock Co., the original manufacturer of PENTAX-brand products

Seeing as Pentax is celebrating its 100th year I thought I would take a look back at one of its 75th anniversary offerings. The Pentax UC1.

I’ve used UC1’s on a number of occasions because few 35mm film cameras are smaller and I really like the 32mm focal length. The choice to make this camera chrome over plastic pretty much ensured that it would look worn even when it isn’t. I’m sure they were not expecting it to wear like that or that someone would be writing about it 25 years later. At the same time they were plating the plastic on the Espio Mini they released a titanium version of the Pentax LX which I’m pretty sure has stood up better. The UC1 (Espio Mini) is a fully automatic camera but focuses and exposes reliably so is easy to like. Happy Birthday Pentax thanks for some great cameras over the years.

The Stereo Revere is an attractive camera which looks great on display.  Unfortunately mine is having issues with advancing the film and the result is some massively multiple exposed images.   There are times when this  could be interesting but I had been hoping to be able to create stereoscopic images.

Looking at the front of the Stereo Revere 33 you can see it has three distinct viewfinder related rectangles.  This is because it has a separate rangefinder for focusing and a viewfinder  for composition.  looking through one and then the other slows down the process but is better than zone focusing.