Anyone who reads Shutterbug regularly will know of my enthusiasm for modern Voigtländer cameras. I'm also extremely fond of the postwar Prominent 35mm leaf-shutter rangefinder camera, and I have a great (though guarded) admiration for its prewar 120 namesake, one of the most...

The Soviet-made Zorkii 4K is the high point of the Leica screw-compatible Zorkii series. Zorkiis started out similar to Feds, but later became quite different. Feds, in turn, were initially arrant Leica copies but later diverged in their own account.

In the days before digital, most film cameras had built-in, battery-driven motor drives. But cameras with motor drives were around long before the electronic age, the only difference being that they ran by clockwork.

Say clockwork to collectors and Robot is the name that springs to mind. These cameras were the brainchild of Heinz Kilfitt, a German watchmaker and prolific...

Germany is a good place for photographic camera enthusiasts to go. This is true for people who are looking for used cameras that they can buy at reasonable prices as well as for classic collectibles. Top models of the most famous brands dominate the market for used and classic cameras, with Leica in highest demand. But other high-value and professional products made by Canon...

Mechanical precision has an almost sensual pleasure of its own. Think of the buttery wind-on of a 1950s Leica M3, or the way that the lens panel of an Alpa 12 glides into place, then fits solid as a rock. Recently...

There were two models of the versatile Mamiya Press medium format rangefinder cameras in the 1960s and '70s, the Universal Press and the Press Super 23. These cameras were designed to be more compact and in many respects more versatile than the bellows type 4x5 and 2x3 press cameras of that era, such as the Speed Graphic, Busch Pressman, and Linhof Technica. The main...

Sixty years is a long time, and it is easy to forget how different life was in those days. In particular, the normal format for snapshots was a black and white contact print just 21⁄4x31⁄4” (6x9cm nominal, 8-on-120 or 620). Enlargements (except “en-prints”) were rare and expensive, and in any case, many of the films of the day were grainy and unsharp when enlarged...