[OFB Cafe] Old 35 MM Camera Gear

[dep]

alas, don.

a little heartbreaking, your report. the camera is worth fixing if (and, 
sadly, only if) you wish to use it to take pictures.

takumar was pentax's name for its lenses (like nikkor for nikons and, in 
the old days, serenar for canons; zeiss had planar -- 5-element and 
wonderful -- and tessar -- four element and wonderful at f8 -- and 
triotar -- three element and capable sometimes of producing identifiable 
images; leitz had summilux -- f1.4 -- and summicron -- f2 -- and other 
lens names, most very good) and takumar lenses were wonderful. you're 
probably right about the coating, the effect of which is, the light had 
better be behind you or there will be flare and loss of contrast. no 
practical way of fixing it.

it is so incredibly unhappy, because the quality of the machinery in that 
camera is oodles and bounds better than anything made now, because it was 
made to be a camera to have for the rest of your life. this as opposed to 
my first digital camera -- i still have it, and now it's too late even to 
give it away -- which was a $1,000 sony. big and ridiculous, with a vast 
2.1 megapixel sensor (though in its defense, i made a decent 8x10 from one 
of its pictures once, the only print from that camera and that printer, 
making it maybe the most expensive print ever) and 10-power
 optical zoom. shot horse shows and weddings with it. it wrote its maximum 
1600x1200 pixel files to floppies, four per floppy. i always thought that 
it would have been nice of sony at that price to have included a little 
dab of memory, so you didn't have to wait for the picture to write to 
floppy before being able to take another one. in that time i could have 
taken 10 pictures with a nikon f or leica, or blasted through an entire 
roll with my f3 with motor.

five years ago, i was combination best man and photographer at a friend's 
wedding. i should have shot film, but i used the sony. it turned out, the 
sensor was heading south, so all the pictures have an odd 
characteristic -- they look like hand-colored black-and-white. probably 
should take it out and see if it still works at all.

i bought that camera 10 years ago. five years ago, people paid $5,000 for 
digital nikons that are today almost as laughable. did you know that 
high-end digital slrs have a fixed number of exposures they can make 
before being, basically, trashed? for the nikon d3, it's 300,000; for the 
exciting new d700, it's 150,000 -- but it's only $3,000 for the body. for 
that price, you could have gotten a couple of pentaxes and every lens and 
accessory made for them and now, 35 years later, given only slight 
maintenance, they would be as good as ever they were.

my expensive d200s will be a joke before the decade is over.

strobes die, they just do. nothing to be done about it. i still have the 
once-standard vivitar 287 -- actually, a couple of 'em -- plus a very 
expensive dedicated nikon flash for the f3. all dead. i think the 
capacitors give out.

i don't think i'm a luddite. then again, i wear a watch that needs to be 
wound up everyday.

i despair over the fate of real photography. i needed last year to shoot 
some pictures of my friends jorma kaukonen, jack casady, and barry 
mitterhoff during a soundcheck -- they're a band called "hot tuna." it was 
important, so i shot film, color negative, which i had processed at the 
local high-end lab. i do not think they had cleaned their processor since 
the clinton administration. the negatives i got back were filthy. i got 
good pictures, but to be usable, each one required a day's spotting.

so it is heartbreaking to say that a fine mechanical film camera in need of 
$50 work is probably not worth it.
-- 
dep

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