Vintage Watches are great, but let’s see some Vintage Cameras

I joined this forum to learn more about vintage watches, but if I’m being honest with myself, my true passion is for vintage cameras and film photography. Camera design used to be an art form, and in my opinion, many cameras made before the 1990s are beautiful. Here’s my first example:


The Rollei 35 is an amazing pocket 35mm film camera. This camera is so small that they couldn’t squeeze a rangefinder into it; you have to use zone focusing, which is basically guesstimating the distance to your subject. You typically walk around with the aperture set to f8 or f11 to make sure your photos are in focus.

Here is #2:


This is a Yashica EM. Yashica made a lot of “poor-mans Rolleiflexes”. This is a 6x6 frame medium format camera. You look from the top of the camera: waist level shooting is fun and provides a different perspective compared with eye-level. I love this camera because I hate editing. When I post photos to Instagram, I don’t even have to crop! Here’s a few photos from this camera:



Here is camera #3, perhaps the most special of all:


Fuji GW690II aka “The Texas Leica” The 6x9 cm frames produced by this camera are sharp and absolutely stunning. You can blow up large prints from this camera, assuming you have loaded quality film. Main downside of this one is it is an absolute lump to haul around, hence the Texas part of its moniker. A few shots from this one:



Last but not least, the workhorse:



Overshadowed by the Nikon F series and Canon F1 in its time, this was Pentax’s professional level film camera. Due to its lower popularity, they can be pretty difficult to find in good condition. Lighter and smaller than the Canon or Nikon but just as robust, this is the camera I would choose if I could only have one.



Show off your vintage cameras!

You might want to get @ICONO in on this one.😀

Or how about @JwRosenthal ?

Also, I forgot to put that the last camera in my post is a Pentax LX, to clarify the model name.

I have never have had in my hands something of such a quality. Linhof Mastertechnika.

Well I pretty much flipped all my film cameras when I "discovered" watches.

I still have this, it's a Rich-ray 35 and maybe there's an Olympus Trip somewhere....

Those nikons are sick! 😲

Still have a Pentax camera body for that lens?

Can the folks who have posted so far add some information about their respective cameras? I haven’t heard of most of the ones shown so far!

I have often thought about picking up a 645 system, as I don’t currently have a camera with that frame size. Mamiya glass is awesome, or so I have heard.

This is my 1959 Zeiss Ikon contaflex slr, with 50mm, 35mm and 115mm lenses. The lens system is very different. The back element is fixed within the camera and only the front element is changed. It takes good pictures and the selenium meter is still pretty accurate after 60 years.
I'm just about to wander up the Bondasca valley to meet my wife coming back and will take the camera along.

I used to have a Leica IIIc but it broke, a pity as it was a lovely thing to use.