ORiginally posted THURSDAY, 8 OCTOBER 2009
Voigtlander Brillant
Picked this up at a flea market for a fiver. Not shot with it yet, but am looking forward to doing so. It's one of the lateish models and is made of Bakelite. Didn't realise until I got it home that there's a little door on the side of it that contains a yellow "cloud" filter and containED an extinction meter.
You'd clip the meter over the top lens and see which number/letter was the dimmest one you could see. You then transfer that number across to a table, and look up what aperture/shutter to use. Neat, huh?
The flap on the left hand side of the chimney keeps coming off, but with a tiny bit of solder/araldite on the end of its hinge pin, it should be OK. It works, except that the hinge pin keeps coming out because the "Voigtlander" plaque isn't on the front any more, unfortunately.
When I got it, various bits were sluggish, but literally a drop of lighter fluid has freed everything up, and now the shutter fires nicely (tested against a metronome on lower speeds, and eyeballed at higher speeds) and the "automatic film transport" also works.
"Automatic film transport sounds pretty advanced for a camera designed in 1932!" you might think. Well, it is pretty advanced, but it's also pretty pointless. There's a little red window on the back like normal, except there's a difficult-to-manuoevre internal cover for it, which you put in place with a twist of a very flat knob. The idea is that you put the film in and wind it until you can see the "1" in the window. You then cover the window, and reset the counter to 1 with a little lever, (which now actually resets, rather than jams, thanks to lighter fluid). Once you've shot frame 1, you push a little lever to release the advance knob, advance the film, and the movement of the film across a little cog engages a ratchet that stops the winding knob when you've advanced enough. In theory. We'll see whether this still actually works, or if I end up with horrendously overlapped frames (or overshooting the end of the roll). So there you go, it's not very automatic, but it does save you the huge hassle of looking to see when to stop winding. It might speed up shooting a frame by a whole, oh, second or so.
The focus is the classic guess/estimate style, so should probably stop down a bit, since the distance markings on the edge of the lens are somewhat faint with age. Opens pretty wide, to f/4.5 and is calibrated down to f/16, but will actually stop down to somewhere around f/22.
This baby is pre-flash synch, so if you want to use a flash, you have to have your subject in pretty much total darkness, then open the shutter, fire the flash, then shut the shutter. All in all, probably better off just waiting until it's a bit sunnier. The camera has both B and T modes, and shutter speeds from 1-1/300 seconds, which appear to be roughly correct. There's a lever to cock the shutter and a lever to fire it. There's also a cable-release socket, which might be handy.
The bottom of the camera has a tripod socket, but it's one of the old German size ones, luckily fitted with an adaptor to allow use of the smaller modern tripod screws.
The viewfinder is a lot like that of my Kodak Duaflex II, but doesn't work so well at close viewing distances (you get a weird distortion and can see inside the lens barrel). It's not a groundglass, but a lens projecting an image up towards the user. There's little arrows on each side at halfway points so that you can line up the horizon. There is also a sports-finder, which doesn't lock open any more - I think something has snapped off the catch, but those things are useless anyway, so it's no great loss. There's a little table of distances vs apertures, showing depth of field at different focussing distances using different apertures. Fairly useful, if slow. Oddly, for a German camera, the distances on the lens/table are in feet and inches, rather than metric, and the writing is in English. Obviously intended for export, despite the lack of an "I" in the word BRILLANT stamped across the front of the camera. Maybe they thought nobody would notice...
Just realised that it also says "GERMANY" on the bottom, as opposed to "DEUTSCHLAND" or "ALLEMAGNE", so it's definitely for export to an anglophone country.
Will post some pictures once I've used it (which may take some time).
You'd clip the meter over the top lens and see which number/letter was the dimmest one you could see. You then transfer that number across to a table, and look up what aperture/shutter to use. Neat, huh?
The flap on the left hand side of the chimney keeps coming off, but with a tiny bit of solder/araldite on the end of its hinge pin, it should be OK. It works, except that the hinge pin keeps coming out because the "Voigtlander" plaque isn't on the front any more, unfortunately.
When I got it, various bits were sluggish, but literally a drop of lighter fluid has freed everything up, and now the shutter fires nicely (tested against a metronome on lower speeds, and eyeballed at higher speeds) and the "automatic film transport" also works.
"Automatic film transport sounds pretty advanced for a camera designed in 1932!" you might think. Well, it is pretty advanced, but it's also pretty pointless. There's a little red window on the back like normal, except there's a difficult-to-manuoevre internal cover for it, which you put in place with a twist of a very flat knob. The idea is that you put the film in and wind it until you can see the "1" in the window. You then cover the window, and reset the counter to 1 with a little lever, (which now actually resets, rather than jams, thanks to lighter fluid). Once you've shot frame 1, you push a little lever to release the advance knob, advance the film, and the movement of the film across a little cog engages a ratchet that stops the winding knob when you've advanced enough. In theory. We'll see whether this still actually works, or if I end up with horrendously overlapped frames (or overshooting the end of the roll). So there you go, it's not very automatic, but it does save you the huge hassle of looking to see when to stop winding. It might speed up shooting a frame by a whole, oh, second or so.
The focus is the classic guess/estimate style, so should probably stop down a bit, since the distance markings on the edge of the lens are somewhat faint with age. Opens pretty wide, to f/4.5 and is calibrated down to f/16, but will actually stop down to somewhere around f/22.
This baby is pre-flash synch, so if you want to use a flash, you have to have your subject in pretty much total darkness, then open the shutter, fire the flash, then shut the shutter. All in all, probably better off just waiting until it's a bit sunnier. The camera has both B and T modes, and shutter speeds from 1-1/300 seconds, which appear to be roughly correct. There's a lever to cock the shutter and a lever to fire it. There's also a cable-release socket, which might be handy.
The bottom of the camera has a tripod socket, but it's one of the old German size ones, luckily fitted with an adaptor to allow use of the smaller modern tripod screws.
The viewfinder is a lot like that of my Kodak Duaflex II, but doesn't work so well at close viewing distances (you get a weird distortion and can see inside the lens barrel). It's not a groundglass, but a lens projecting an image up towards the user. There's little arrows on each side at halfway points so that you can line up the horizon. There is also a sports-finder, which doesn't lock open any more - I think something has snapped off the catch, but those things are useless anyway, so it's no great loss. There's a little table of distances vs apertures, showing depth of field at different focussing distances using different apertures. Fairly useful, if slow. Oddly, for a German camera, the distances on the lens/table are in feet and inches, rather than metric, and the writing is in English. Obviously intended for export, despite the lack of an "I" in the word BRILLANT stamped across the front of the camera. Maybe they thought nobody would notice...
Just realised that it also says "GERMANY" on the bottom, as opposed to "DEUTSCHLAND" or "ALLEMAGNE", so it's definitely for export to an anglophone country.
Will post some pictures once I've used it (which may take some time).
Do you have the depth of focus table of the camera? cheers
ReplyDeleteHi there Anonymous. I do have the DoF table, although I no longer have the camera (the flap fell off before I sold it to raise money for a tax bill a few years back). I'll take a quick snap and upload it later for you.
ReplyDelete