We took a break from the Top 20 Countdown last month to bring you all the great news from this year's PMA Show. In this issue we'll continue to count down the next five; be sure to pick up next month's issue for the Top Five and our completion of this amazing work by classic camera expert par excellence Jason Schneider. As we continue this series be sure to weigh...

Beware: heresy is about to be spoken. It is that you might care to take one of the most sublimely constructed and complex of all mechanical cameras, and butcher it.

The sacrificial victim is a Linhof Technika 70, which entered production (as far as I know) in the early 1960s: certainly...

"You don't actually use that thing, do you?" This was a question one reader asked me when he saw a picture of my Kowa/SIX in one of my books or magazine articles (I forget which, now). And the answer is that yes, I do, and increasingly often at that.
The...

There's an old saying: If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. But sometimes you get lucky.

I couldn't resist the Pentacon sixTL that I saw in FotoSkoda in Prague. I won't say that FotoSkoda is the best camera store in the world, because there are too many other contenders, including many Shutterbug advertisers. It is...

Bewildering numbers of folding Retinas were built in Germany at the old Nagel-Werke in Stuttgart, an early Kodak acquisition. The first Type 117 Retina I appeared in 1933, and the last folders were the IB/IIC/IIIC, made from 1957-58 to 1960. Retinettes are...

The first large format monorail cameras appeared on the market in the late 1940s and early '50s from European manufacturers like Linhof and Sinar. Linhof's first monorail, the original Kardan, was released in '52, the same year the German company moved into worldwide distribution.

Monorails were quickly adopted by studio and architectural...

Mamiya introduced the Super 23 in 1967 and it would be the next to the last design the company would release as part of their series of "press" cameras. The term "press camera" was already an anachronism when the model was...