Saturday, 11 December 2010

Week 50 - Voigtlander Bessa 1


Voigtlander Bessa 1, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.

I've had this camera a long time, I don't remember where I got it, but I don't think I paid much for it.
It takes 8 6x9cm exposures on 120 rollfilm, originally it would have had a mask to allow 16 6x4.5cm exposures, but this is missing, though the viewfinder still has the appopriate supplementary window for this format.
The Bessa 1 was made for a number of years, I think this one dates from the late 1930s or early 1940s.

1 comment:

  1. I have a very nice one of these - I got it from an antique shop on abbeydale road. It came complete with original leather case, instruction book, and the alternate masking frames. At £25, I thought this was a bit of a bargain.

    When I ran a colour slide film through it, I was quite impressed that the shutter was still working accurately. The colour balance was a bit shifted towards blue/magenta, but then I suppose that the lens on a camera this old would not have needed to be accurately colour balanced.

    Its now in a display cabinet with my only other film camera that I keep for sentimental reasons: an Olympus Pen EE3 35mm half-frame, which was my pocket-size "snapshot" camera for many years.

    How many old cameras do you have?

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