Comments on: These Failed Camera Designs Were (and still are) Pretty Terrible

By: Ed

Ed — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 03:02:20 +0000

In reply to Enver Hoxha. I wholeheartedly agree with half of your contentions. The R8/9 is derided by armchair bloviators who've never used the camera, much less ever held one. They are indeed the finest SLRs of their age, or of any age. The M5? Feh. How does one say, "WTF?" in Deutsch?

By: dr0mabuse

dr0mabuse — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 03:31:31 +0000

I just bought a Konica AiBorg from Great Britain that is announced as fully functional. I think I’ll get some shots of very astonished people. The technics is not bad for street photography.

By: John

John — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 18:32:32 +0000

Its an old thread and I must say I enjoyed the article and it is nicely blogged, but you went to far in dogging the Yashica Samurai. The Samurai 1 is a great shooter and winning in a Holga shootout any day. Shoot on a tripod and you can achieve very good resolution for sharp 8×10 enlargements. Certainly good for dreamy wide open portraits with a bunch of induced flare and cross processing hues. Plus you can shoot a lot more frames and faster. It is still a good camera for action, once it focuses and starts firing. Preset focus is good for split second timing, but it will lock focus and shoot fast in long focus shots, but not cluttered foregrounds. The motor drive has a pretty fast cycling rate for a cheap camera like 3 frames a second.
The Samurai was not a failure. It was manufactured for at least 7 years in three different models and a sub variation or two including the ONLY LEFT HANDED camera ever built, to my knowledge. The Samurai ZL.
Overall not bad product performance for a ‘weird stinker’. I have 3 that still work fine and shot the last roll of Kodachrome ever developed by Dwaynes in Parsons, KS through it to get 75 & 1/2 nice half frame positives. I loaded it up once with a home-reload roll of thin Efke 100 film to the tune of 100 frames on one roll! The original model of the Z has an intervalometer on the back with time stamp. So ‘not a loser’ camera.
Besides being a decent street-fighter, the best trick the Samurai does, like most half frame cameras, is in the production of thematically related Triptychs printed on one sheet of paper which can present an aspect of the passage of time, a tool that is sometimes hard to find in the artisan’s toolbox. Good for panoramas, too and recreation of photo-booth effect.
For an added mind-blower, realize its nearly exactly like a 35mm movie camera in its format and film transport. You could make a stop-action cartoon with it and have the roll film directly tele-cined to movie film or video.

By: Dave D

Dave D — Sat, 02 Mar 2019 22:49:21 +0000

My sister had a Handle. Don’t recall her using it, even when film was available. I do remember it siting in the hallway closet for many years after Kodak got sued.

In 1996 my fiancee and I bought the first ELPH. It was really neat, although the images never were. However, the look of the ELPH models influenced many digital P&S Canons for years afterwards.

By: Flavio Colker

Flavio Colker — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:42:39 +0000

In reply to Lan'dorien. So.. which people are more open minded about being filmed than photographed? What´s their logic?

By: ScottP

ScottP — Wed, 16 May 2018 18:25:56 +0000

In reply to Enver Hoxha.

You can use them; you just can’t collapse them. I remember seeing a metal collar that went around the lens tube to prevent accidentally collapsing the lens. Don’t remember whether it was a Leica item or third-party after market.
In any case, you’re right. By the time the M5 was introduced, the collapsible 50s, even the Summicron, were not the best choice.
Photographers were not interested in “character,” or bokeh either, in the 70’s.