Silverbased

Many Japanese camera companies originally got their start by imitating German camera designs. (Nikon and Canon began by copying Contax and Leica, respectively.)

Yet in the second half of the 1950s, Japanese camera-makers began flexing their technical muscles as innovators in their own right. And within 10 years, original Japanese camera designs would completely dominate the marketplace—as they continue to do today. So I’m always intrigued by cameras dating from that first burst of technical innovation—like this Konica IIIA, introduced in 1958.

Konica IIIA, an innovative and stoutly-built 35mm rangefinder

“Konica” comes from Konishiroku Camera (just as Leica meant Leitz Camera). Konishiroku is the oldest name in Japanese photography, starting as an importer, then building their own first cameras in 1882.

The IIIA was the penultimate evolution of Konica’s I, II, III series of post-WWII, fixed-lens rangefinders. (While these were all meterless models, the final Konica IIIM was basically a IIIA with an ugly light meter grafted onto it.)

With the III series, Konica aimed to sell a high-quality rangefinder camera with an excellent 6-element lens at about 1/4 of typical Leica prices, by omitting the feature of an interchangeable lens mount.

Think Different

Note the absence of the typical thumb-wind film advance lever. The III series cocks its shutter and winds the film using two strokes of the lever sticking out to the right of the lens.

This odd-sounding design actually works quite nicely for me: As a left-eyed shooter, I’m able to keep my eye to the viewfinder when advancing—rather than jabbing myself in the forehead with a wind lever.

Street Shooter

Rangefinder cameras are often the first choice for photographers who want to unobtrusively capture street scenes, or people in action. M-series Leicas, whose cloth shutters only make a discreet “shlurp” sound, are the iconic example.

Yet leaf-shutter cameras can be even quieter, and this Konica is exceptionally silent. Even held right against my head, with typical outdoor backround noise I can barely hear the click of its shutter. You do give up some of that stealth with the IIIA’s rather noisy and conspicuous film-advance lever, though.

A Clear View

I need to gush about the viewfinder of this camera, the breakthrough feature of the “A” model. It is simply one of the great rangefinder/viewfinders of all time. It has a life-size 1:1 view, with very clear bright-line framelines. In fact, they’re actually brighter and larger than the ones on my 2005 Voigtlander Bessa R—which is really saying something.

What’s more, the framelines are not just parallax-adjusted; they also change size, matching a lens’s slightly reduced angle of view as you focus closer! This yields outstanding framing accuracy—not commonly a strength of rangefinder cameras.

I’m not aware of any other 35mm rangefinder which does this, past or present. Your only alternative would be to buy an immense 1960s Linhof Technika 6×7, which has the same feature (as did some older Polaroid models).

It’s true that the IIIA’s rangefinder spot does not have sharply-defined edges, so you can’t use the “split image” method of focusing. But the rangefinder baseline of about 49mm with 1:1 magnification gives excellent focusing accuracy.

Konica even innovated with the film-loading scheme for these cameras. Typical 35mm cassettes have a light trap formed by velvet strips; but Konica sold proprietary cassettes featuring a special gate, which linkages in the film compartment would open wide—thus avoiding all possibility of film scratching. Conventional film cassettes worked fine, actually, so the system is forgotten today (although I would love to find a few of the special cassettes to load bulk film into).

Evil EV

But the fatal flaw of the IIIA’s design from my point of view is its EV coupling—an interlock between the shutter speed and aperture rings.

The black ring with its white EV numbers moves in parallel with the shutter-speed ring. It engages the silver aperture scale with stiff spring tension (pulling it backwards uncouples them); but the f/stop ring does not have its own finger-grips to allow you to set the aperture directly.

Instead, you determine the correct EV number for the scene (e.g. from a light meter offering an EV scale); then wrestle with the black ring until the red pointer aligns with the proper value. After that, apertures are linked automatically to changes of shutter speed, setting the combination shown by the black diamond pointer.

The Konica IIIA’s annoying EV interlock, here at EV 11. (Apologies that my EV scale looks so dirty.)

The theoretical advantage is that when you shoot a series of pictures in the same light, you can switch between the (uneven) shutter speed steps (i.e. 10, 25, 50, 100, 250) and the correct aperture is automatically selected for you—even if that is not a whole f/stop number.

Disappointingly, the 1/500th shutter speed does NOT couple correctly. Switching to that speed, the shutter-speed dial rotates further than normal, to tension a supplementary spring in the leaf shutter. Consequently the EV interlock opens the lens aperture by one extra stop, leading to overexposure.

As I rarely shoot more than a couple of frames in the same lighting, the EV coupling is simply an inconvenience. It’s hard to avoid a lot of awkward pulling back and twisting on the black ring to reach your desired settings.

Going Backwards

1957 Konica III, showing aperture tab and EV scale

The IIIA had been preceded by this 2nd version of the Konica III, which had a much more sensible EV coupling system. A small tab operating the aperture could be rotated along with the EV scale (located directly on the nicely-machined shutter-speed ring). Or, the tab could be flexed outwards, easily disengaging from the EV-scale detents to set the aperture directly.

However the location of the f/stop scale—out of sight on the underside of the III’s lens barrel—was not exactly convenient.

Thanks to E. & K. Norris for the loan of this beautiful Konica III

There were also some appearance changes between the III and the IIIA—but to my entirely subjective tastes, the styling of the earlier model is nicer. The IIIA added an oddly-sculpted self-timer lever, and lost the III’s charming chevron-shaped advance plunger. And the IIIA’s astoundingly sophisticated bright-line viewing system came at the cost of much larger, more awkward-looking viewfinder windows.

The solidity and finish of these Konica III cameras remains impressive. Later Konica rangefinders were worthy models, but the build quality moved more towards the “consumer” end of the scale.

Konica still had one technological breakthrough up its sleeve, with 1965’s revolutionary Auto-Reflex—the camera which introduced auto-exposure to mainstream 35mm SLRs. But in later years, the company lost direction and eventually merged with Minolta; the combined company recently abandoned camera-making entirely.

So it’s nice to remember the long heritage of Konica with a model like the IIIA, which—flawed EV scheme aside—shows the company at its heights of making interesting, innovative cameras.

[a shorter version of this originally posted on Flickr 14 Dec 2007]

I was looking over some creaky old folding cameras recently—probably about 90 years old—and was amused by a curious fact: A couple of them used a film size you can still buy today.

Now, perforated 35mm film has existed ever since it emerged from Thomas Edison’s lab as a movie stock in 1892. (William Dickson is credited with the actual invention.) But only in the 1920s, after the Leica camera, did 35mm gain wide acceptance as a still-camera film.

Even then, bulk cine film had to be re-wound into special film cassettes that were proprietary to particular camera brands. Finally, in 1934 Eastman Kodak introduced the Retina camera, along with a new disposable metal film cassette preloaded with 35mm film. In keeping with Kodak’s other three-digit film designations, the new format was called “135.”

My father’s 1937 Retina: 3rd version, three years after the introduction of 135 film

Cleverly, Kodak’s German division (the former August Nagel cameraworks) designed the cassette to be backwards-compatible with Leica and Contax cameras, as well as the new Retina line. Thanks to the popularity of the Leica and the Retina—and perhaps even more so, the affordable Argus—the 135 cassette was a success. Today, it’s the universally-known way to shoot 35mm film (ignoring oddities like 250-exposure backs for motor-drive cameras).

Yet this is not the oldest still-camera format we continue to use today. That distinction belongs to 120 film.

Kodak introduced the “No. 2 Brownie Camera” in 1901, a simple $2.00 box camera designed to shoot images 2-1/4″x 3-1/4″*. And for this camera, Kodak introduced a new film size, 120.

The earliest spools had wooden cores (this one is from Ansco, who used the designations 4A or B2 for the size), later metal, and finally plastic. But the dimensions of these three spools are the same.

As time went on, 120 was adopted by a wide range of camera styles: From simple snapshooters to the fine Rolleiflex (introduced 1929) and Hasselblad (introduced 1948). Its use in these professional-level cameras helped keep demand for the format strong; so today it remains the most widely-available film size after 35mm.

I need to get on my soapbox for one brief rant: Please, please, please, don’t mistakenly call this size “120mm.” Even B&H’s online store has been known to get this wrong. The film is actually about 63mm wide, and the 120 is just an arbitrary number from the dim mists of Kodak history.

Originally Kodak’s three-digit size designations were supposed to have some meaning: but the rationales were rather obscure, and soon became unworkable as new sizes appeared. In any case, Kodak continued to give new film formats various three-digit monikers, like 127 for “Vest Pocket” camera rollfilm or 828 for “Bantam” size—right up through 110, the drop-in plastic cartridges introduced with the Pocket Instamatic series in 1972.

Today, the roadside of photo history is littered with the carcasses of extinct film formats. The once-common 116 and 616 sizes are gone, and so are 620 and 828. “Vest Pocket” 127 limps along with a single Croatian emulsion still available. Users of 126 Instamatics must scour the internet for the last sources of film.

Yet even at 107 years old, the 120 film format still seems to be going strong.

*Today we might call this “6×9 cm,” although that’s only approximate: the actual negative is more like 5.6 x 8.2 cm.