As some of you may (not) know, Rolleiflex Says It’s Back and Will Release a New Digital TLR Camera.
Had a Rolleiflex TLR back in the 70's. Didn't like looking down and up, down and up. Tilting the camera this way and that as every movement was reversed. Don't compose in square. It locked up, wouldn't shoot, wouldn't cock. No repair shops around, actually regret this now, but threw it into a dumpster.
I still have a Rolleiflex 2.8 D model that my father bought in the mid 1950's. It was very hard to adjust the aperature and shutter speed and the shutter would hang-up. I sent it to KEH for repair and it came back with clean optics and everything works like a new camera.
I used it when I was in high school and college for sports and event photography and almost always had it with me. I never found the viewfinder, focus system to be a problem. In sports photography you have to be very quick at focusing and shooting. There was a learning curve but I got adept at it. One trick was to always stay focused on whoever had the basketball or football, etc. Then. all I had to concentrate on was the shutter button.
Mamiya killed the Rolleiflex with its interchangeable lenses. The C-220 and C-330 were the twin reflex cameras most professionals used.
I had a Rollei with a Tessar f3.5. It had great image quality but I always felt restrained with the lack of interchangeable lenses. I bought a Pentax 645 with a couple of lenses and I was a happy camper again.
sgt hop
Loc: baltimore md,now in salisbury md
still have my rollie with the 3.5 lens also have the 35mm back.....
frejus wrote:
As some of you may (not) know, Rolleiflex Says It’s Back and Will Release a New Digital TLR Camera.
I can't understand anybody wanting a twin lens digital camera. Why deal with the parallax problem when EVF is available. If Rolli wants to satisfy a market that wants to look down to compose their shots, build a single lens camera with a screen on top.
My first medium format camera was a Mamiya C330 and I used it to shoot weddings. I was much happier with my Hassy or eventually my Bronica ETRS.
Having used a twin lens Rollei for many years, I can say that the two lens system was only a problem with closeups.
I got around that by focusing with the upper lens and then raising the camera up about three inches using a crank-up tripod post.
Common practice was to allow for the lens separation by backing away from the subject and never completely filling the frame with the subject. I had a darkroom so I could crop any way I wanted.
camerapapi wrote:
Mamiya killed the Rolleiflex with its interchangeable lenses. The C-220 and C-330 were the twin reflex cameras most professionals used.
I had a Rollei with a Tessar f3.5. It had great image quality but I always felt restrained with the lack of interchangeable lenses. I bought a Pentax 645 with a couple of lenses and I was a happy camper again.
I had a Mamiya TLR C-330 with eye-level prism finder and a couple of twin-lenses back when I was photography major at R.I.T. . It had been bought for me in Hong Kong by a friend of the family that was a merchant ship captain. Back in the 70's, photo gear was cheaper in Hong Kong than in the USA. Loved the quality of those medium format negs and slides.
Later sold it in a money crunch while still a student. I never told the captain that had carried it all the way from Hong Kong, ever. He has long ago passed away..
Wish I had kept the Mamiya.
Cheers
I suspect that the only drawbacks to a medium format single lens refles would be that the mirrors are large and the motion-induced forces would make the camera a little less stable and there might have been a slightly longer blackout time.
That is only a presumprion on my part because I never used one. In the Rolleiflex twin lens only the shutter only consisted of radial shutter blades of minimal mass and radial motion. The vibration was almost non-existant compared to moving mirrors and focal plane shutters.
yorkiebyte
Loc: Scottsdale, AZ/Bandon by the Sea, OR
yorkiebyte wrote:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/404203338694?
Hopefully better than this 5 M.P. trash...... I paid about $75. for this a few years ago. It evidently has an older phone camera sensor - images were not acceptable to me AT ALL! I sent it back and got my $$ back. The Ebay price for these now is a total joke!!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/404203338694? br br Hope... (
show quote)
For some reason, items on eBay from Japan are often priced very high.
In the late 1950s I used a Rolliecord VA to shoot weddings (my dad was a portrait photographer specializing in children, and when they grew up they wanted him to shoot the wedding but he didn't like the fast pace). Had a Braun strob light that was pretty powerful. Most of the time I flipped the top of the hood and used the result (I think it was called the sports finder). Of course could not focus. What I did was estimate distance, and adjust focus and aperture (since intensity of light reduces as a function of distance). So, was not hindered by having to look down, or get confused by which direction to move the camera. I developed the rolls myself, and tried to keep track of which rolls might lead slightly more or less processing, depending on whether I thought I might have misjudged aperture. The strobe, of course, froze action so the trick was not to have the aperture sufficient to take an image based on the actual available light.
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