Camera Talk

Thank you all!

BTW welcome to our small but loyal club.

Thank you Larry, I feel at home.
Im learning a lot from you all and Im sorry if I post too much, good weather in Moscow is rare and I take every chance I have these days.

No one here can never post too much.

That's a highly unusual camera with a bicycle chain thrown into the mechanics. And of course it has Voigtlander's focusing dial/knob.

I never really cared for the "focus by knob" approach with a camera that is to be held at eye level. Sometimes, it seemed like Voigtlander did things just to be different. Like that massive plunger on the Vitessa. Oh well, I'll save that rant for another day.

Go ahead and rant today. I like Mike rants. I also have a Voightlander that I thought was designed buy someone who was sitting at a drafting table with a bottle of Apfelkorn.

The way I understand it, German patent laws made it somewhat difficult and expensive to license others technology, plus the different designers were slightly arrogant in that they didn't want to have to fall back to using others designs. So if you had six different German made cameras sitting before you, and just looked at one thing they do (such as film transport), you'd likely see six different ways of doing it. Voigtlander was willing to take this philosophy to the extreme. It's the same reason a Compur shutter on one camera usually can't be used as a parts donor for another brand of camera with a Compur because the camera manufacturer would have exclusive designs requiring different specifications in the shutters. This eventually lightened up after WWII, but not until a long time had passed, and most of the manufacturers had too.

PF