Classic Camera Reviews

If a picture is really brilliant, you don't have to worry about grain or sharpness or anything else: to quote Mike Gristwood, late of Ilford, "How much good would it do you to know the technical details of any one of Henri Cartier-Bresson's pictures?"

By the same token, if a picture is really bad, no amount of technical brilliance is going...

Germany is a good place for photographic camera enthusiasts to go. This is true for people who are looking for used cameras that they can buy at reasonable prices as well as for classic collectibles. Top models of the most famous brands dominate the market for used and classic cameras, with Leica in highest demand. But other high-value and professional products made by Canon...

The Baldessa 1 from Balda in the Schwarzwald is one of those cameras that quickens the heart of a collector simply by its looks: beautiful styling and a superb late-1950s West German finish. Unfortunately upon closer examination it turns out to be a bit of a bimbo (for the ladies, think of it as a himbo or dumb hunk--I don't want to be unduly sexist).

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The question posed above was the first reaction to the news about the new Zeiss Ikon rangefinder 35mm in Japan, and perhaps in the US and the rest of the world, when the new camera was unveiled at photokina 2004. But this was wrong, because it was a completely new camera proposed by Carl Zeiss AG.

At photokina 2002 in Cologne, Dr. Scherle, Vice...

What determines whether a camera is collectible? Quality? Technical ingenuity? Commercial success (or failure)? All of these things--but some deserve to be saved from the scrap heap just because they are pretty. The Bilora Bella 44 has little else to commend it. The lens is indifferent; the shutter limited; the 127 film needed to feed it is hard to find; film counting is by...

A "universal" camera intended for both handheld action and tripod-mounted corrective photography, the Linhof Technika 70 is a combination of press and technical designs. Introduced in 1963 by Nikolaus Karpf KG in Munich, Germany, the Technika 70 was similar in concept (combined range/viewfinder focusing, folding-bed bellows camera of alloy metal construction) to the...

The first large format monorail cameras appeared on the market in the late 1940s and early '50s from European manufacturers like Linhof and Sinar. Linhof's first monorail, the original Kardan, was released in '52, the same year the German company moved into worldwide distribution.

Monorails were quickly adopted by studio and architectural...