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From: jeff@tesla.UUCP (Jeff Frey)
Newsgroups: net.rec.photo
Subject: Exaktas
Message-ID: <251@tesla.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Nov-83 18:20:49 EST
Article-I.D.: tesla.251
Posted: Mon Nov 28 18:20:49 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Nov-83 02:34:51 EST
Lines: 21

Ah, how time flies! Here`s someone old enough to have bought a new
Topcon D1 yet not old enough to know what an Exakta is.  The first
35mm SLR, that`s all.  Virtually unchanged in design from about 1936 to
the sixties.  Interchangeable finders, non-return mirror, focal-plane
shutter from 12sec. to 1/1000, bayonet mount, no provision for
internal triggering of diaphragm stopdown, a built-in knife to
cut off your film if you`d taken as many pictures as you wanted (cassette-
cassette loading required for this trick).  Beautifully made pre-war,
looked the same but rather tinny thereafter.  Some very good lenses
developed by Zeiss/Jena for this camera, including the famous
180mm/2.8 Olympic (1936) Sonnar.  A real classic.  Some of its
designers must live on in the various Pentacon cameras, nominally from
a different "company" in the same city, Dresden.  The Exa was a low-budget
($99.95 in 1954) charmer, like a 5/8 scale Exakta but with a neat-o
combined mirror and shutter mechanism that had a top speed of 1/150 sec.
and besides limited the range of focal lengths the camera could accommodate
without vignetting.

Oh, in my childhood (i.e., before Pentax invented the instant-return
mirror) what I wouldn`t have given for an Exakta VX IIa....
Jeff