Wallace Koopmans Artlog

The defining feature of this camera has to be that 38-180mm focal length lens.  A lens that I might point out has an aperture of f12.9  at the long end.  Doing a little math in the form of a word problem.

Q: On a nice clear day Little Suzy has a Canon Z180 loaded with 400 ASA film and wants to take a picture of her friend Phil who is off in the distance on the edge of the woods looking like a hipster lumberjack.  If Suzy zooms to 180mm how much motion blur will the picture have?

A:  As Phil is in the shade of the woods and has a dark beard the light is likely to be around EV 11 so the camera would select a shutter speed of around 1/60 of a second or about 2 stops too slow for that focal length on 35mm film resulting in just enough blur to make you say ‘Ugggg where is my digital camera and is that a squirrel attacking Phils face’

I also don’t think that the focusing is quite up to the zoom factor of the lens as it seems to miss focus more than less ambitious zoom models.

One thing about one camera:  You can set the flash to always be off through this simple method.  With the camera off hold down the timer button then press the flash button, CF 1-0 will show on the LCD (That’s custom function 1 – off) press the zoom in button once to select CF 2-0 now press the flash button to set it to CF 2-1 (Custom function 2 – on) , turn the camera on to finish the setting.  Now when you turn the camera off it will remember the shooting and flash mode so you can disable the flash and keep it that way.  Super easy, Ugggg where is my digital camera?

Sure there may be prettier cameras and ones with more personality but this Beauty has it all in one package.  This camera incorporates all the design and technology that the late 1950’s had to throw at a camera.  The 45mm lens has 6 elements in 4 groups with a fast maximum aperture of f1.9.  The selenium meter provides a needle displayed on the top plate (I have to admit to not using it though).  To trip the shutter the film advance lever needs to be left out slightly providing a shutter lock so it won’t go off in your camera bag.

The rangefinder patch is unusual in that it is a circle where most I’ve come across are squares rectangles or diamond shapes.

More on the Beauty Lightomatic here When Beauty isn’t subjective

Like grampa’s plaid shirt the Ricoh 35 just keeps working. This camera wouldn’t win any beauty contests but those weird appendages on the lens are there to keep it held firm as you focus, not to be attractive. That attitude extends to the rest of the camera too, if it doesn’t serve a purpose it just isn’t there. The shutter is somewhat limiting topping out at 1/200 second and only having four other speeds but since its completely manual you can usually get an exposure that works.

Something happened along the way to this blog post.  I had originally intended to show the difference in output from these two cameras using their respective film formats (35mm for the Big Mini and APS for the Super Big Mini) but the thing is that it really is indisputable that 35mm film is better so I decided to just throw all of the shots together and forget about it.  Several things are apparent however. The wide aspect of the APS film can be used to make an interesting difference in some compositions, it amounts to 16:9 when you use the entire frame and the other thing is that the Super Big Mini has quite a bit of vignetting with the larger 35mm film.

Big Mini and Super Big Mini (which is actually a double oxymoron)