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...

One of the joys of classic cameras, indeed, of classic anything--is the absence of "me-too" design; and the Nikonos II illustrated is about as far from "me too" as you can get.

Bob Shell was covering medium format cameras and high-end digital; Peter Burian got 35mm SLRs and point-and-shoots; Joe Farace had other digital cameras. And I was the one who got lucky, with rangefinder cameras, large format, and Weird Stuff.
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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...