Following a theme from yesterday, and having seen Pall’s old FED range finder, here are two more oldies from my collection:

The Olympus 35RC on the left has yet to make a picture for PotD. Many people mistake it for a Olympus Trip, but it’s much nicer than that. Shutter priority auto, full manual override, range finder focussing, and full exposure info in the viewfinder. It’s taken Leica decades to catch up with the spec of this mid-70’s wonder! On the right is a Yashica Electro 35 GTN, range finder focussing, f1.7 lens and aperture-priority auto.

These old cameras are full of ingenious and useful features. For example, the Yashica’s viewfinder frame moves as you focus to correct for parallax errors It was supposedly the worlds fist auto exposure camera. Revolutionary stuff in 1966! The Olympus has an auto flash system that links the aperture to focus distance, using a standard manual flash gun. In use, it’s more reliable than Canon’s much hyped E-TTL system.

When I hear people saying they must have this or that feature, a 10x zoom, or a movie mode, I wonder if they’ve ever used a camera designed just to take photographs. Perhaps these are the Volkswagens of the camera world!

Example shots:

PotD 3rd April ‘03 with the Yashica

3 pictures from LeMans 24hr 2002