Best kept secret in photography

[ditto1958]

In the 60's and 70's the cool cameras to have for photography "enthusiasts" were rangefinders. SLR's were big, clunky and so expensive they were mostly for pro's. Canon AE-1's and OM-10's hadn't come out yet. If one could not afford a Leica, or even a Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Yashica and others came out with new model rangefinders regularly. Many amazingly good ones are now available on ebay, often for less than $50.

The Canon Canonet cameras are very well-known. Yashica Electros have an amazing, huge, f1.7 lens which takes extremely sharp photos. Many of them are as cheap as $10 on ebay.

This may sound familiar to Oly fans: Olympus, while far from the sales leader for these cameras, made some of the best ones and often was a leader in new technological features.

I have a manual exposure model, the 35LC, which I believe came out in the 60's. I loaded up a Canonet G-III QL17, a Yashica Electro GSN and the 35LC, all with f1.7 lenses and took shots for comparison. My subjective opinion: 3. Canon 2. Yashica 1. Olympus (Yashica was close, though).

These are great cameras. FAST, sharp lenses, easy to focus, some are more compact than SLR's. If you are looking for a camera to carry with you all the time or on vacations, this is something to seriously consider.

 

[Shadowfox]

Well thanks Mark, I just need one more person attesting to the coolness of the LC, now I have to check it out

 

[weedram]

I have an LC, along with 2 35SPs and other Oly RFs. I like the LC, and it has the quietest shutter of the "full-sized" Oly RFs. (It is significantly larger than the SP.) But the viewfinder does not match the SP for brightness, contrast and patch visibility. Under certain lighting conditions the meter display, which is at the top of the VF, disappears on me. That just be my s&le, although John gave it a good CLA recently. There is a meter display on the top plate though, and that is very cool. And I like the CDS cell being mounted inside the filter ring, as opposed to the SPs cell on the face of the top plate.

The lens is great, images have been quite nice. But I need to give it more use.

 

[weedram]

My LC has suffered two setbacks with respect to rangefinder going out of alignment (fixed by John at no charge ... thanks!), but it has gone out of alignment again PLUS the shutter release is locked up. I'm going to work on it myself as I think it is either a bad s&le or the LC is particularly fragile and prone to these problems. It's not fair to expect any tech to assure that a camera of this age will be rock solid. It's too bad, as there are several things I like about this camera.

The SP, on the other hand, has been very reliable.