Picture from
Camerapedia.
I would take my own, but my digital camera has died, I hope that the original photographer doesn't mind.
Decided to do a review of this little camera. I picked it up in a charity shop in Rayleigh for, IIRC, £5.50. I mainly bought it because it looks nice.
It's small, it's pretty and it comes in a neat little leather/plastic case, which despite being a never-ready case is actually pretty useful.
The lens on my Beirette is a slightly superior one to the one on the camera in the picture above. Mine is an E.Ludwig 45mm "Meritar" lens, which opens up to f/2.9, slightly wider than the f/3.5 above. It stops down to f/22. It will focus as close as 2 feet, with the DoF extending nearer than (~1') that if you stop down enough.
The shutter is a "Junior 2" with three speeds - 30, 60, 125 and a B setting. To be honest, how many more speeds do you actually need, unless you're shooting in bright sun with fast film?
The shutter has a double exposure lock, so that you can't expose the same frame twice. Unfortunately it's not infallible, especially if you don't wind the winder fully in one smooth go. That way you get three pictures over 2 frames, if you're unlucky. It has a cable-release socket as well, for if you want to take long exposures, or remotely trigger the shutter.
The view finder is absolutely minute, the window being about 3mm x 6mm. When I got mine, the tiny, weeny viewfinder was totally clouded, with what I assume must be cigarette tar. The camera doesn't smell of smoke, but I can't think what else would cause that discolouration which scratched off with a thumbnail quite easily. Unfortunately, the internal sides of the glass in the viewfinder also have this crap on them, which obviously I can't remove without dismantling the whole thing. I'm not that fussed really, I can see a sort of yellowed image through the viewfinder, and as everyone who's ever used any kind of camera that's not SLR will know, the viewfinder doesn't give much better than a good guess as to what's going to be in your picture.
Interestingly enough, the viewfinder does have two settings, one for "N" and the other for "
∞". Where "infinity" ends and "near" begins, I have no idea, but it's fairly irrelevant since changing between modes makes little, if any, difference to what you can see through the viewfinder, except that in "infinity" mode, you can't see quite as much of the lens barrel in the corner of the view.
There's a flash cable socket on the lens barrel and a cold-shoe on the top. If I can get my old-style bulb-flash working, I might put it on this camera, because they're both pretty stylish.
The winder knob has a reminder dial on it with film speeds in DIN and types of film. In order to rewind the film, you have to push a little switch underneath the winder from "T" to "R" (whatever they might stand for), then lift up the winder and twist to unlock the advance mechanism. Another wheel on the LHS is for rewinding the film into the canister. If you pull up the LHS wheel there's two vertical pins. You can spin these around to bring the frame counter back to zero.
Talking of film, I should probably discuss loading this camera. Opening the back is a bit of a puzzle (well, maybe just for me). If you look at the picture of the camera at the top, there's a bar along the RHS of the camera, it looks like it might move up and down, or hinge out. It doesn't. You have to twist it laterally, so that the bottom comes towards you and the top moves away. This kind of prises the back off the camera, which isn't hinged and just comes off as a whole piece. This took me and several other people quite a while to work out. Once you finally are inside, there's a flappy pressure plate hinged to the inside of the camera. It's a bit weird, but there we go. Loading is pretty simple, as long as you make sure that the film goes under the flap, not over it, and that it engages the sprocket holes with the sprockets on the cog.
Anywho, it produces really nice pictures, sharp, as long as you guess the focussing distance accurately enough (UPDATE: It doesn't, see below). There's a DoF scale on the lens, so you can work out what'll be in focus at the aperture you've chosen. I ran a roll of chromogenic BW film through this because there's no meter and it has good latitude for those who have to guess their exposures. It's also pretty fast so it's OK to stop down a bit for more DoF. Will add some photos from it when I can find them, as I last used it about 6mths ago.
I've just found the pictures. It seems I'd confused my memory of a different camera's results. The pictures I got from this camera weren't great. Most of them were blurred, although I think this was more due to the badly placed shutter release than bad focussing. Pressing the shutter release basically jars the camera. Not great for keeping things blur-free. Even on small 6x4 prints it was obvious. There were several totally blank frames on the roll - I think this is probably more due to a lack of a meter, and optimistic light estimations rather than a shutter fault. There were about 2 crisp, sharp photos on the roll, but I think an 18:1 success rate is pretty low. If you could be bothered to carry a release cable with this camera, it might fare considerably better, but then it loses half its charm, of being small, stylish and easy to use.
Oh, it is a very quiet camera, so for those of you who worry about that sort of thing, it might be OK...
