Polaroid 600 SE

In the past I've owned one other medium format rangefinder, and that was a Mamiya press, this Polaroid camera was intended as a professional camera of the highest standard, the basis for the camera is the Mamiya Press, which has created a very unusual camera, with a fairly good following, and not without good reason.

The Polaroid 600SE accepts Polaroid Type 100 film which includes Fujifilms offerings of FP100C, FP100B and FP3000B, the last two have been discontinued but can still be found.
There are three lenses available in the system, 75mm wide angle, 127mm standard and a 150mm slight telephoto.

The camera itself is a fairly simple design, a rangefinder with a well designed patch, framelines for the 127mm and 150mm lenses, the shutter itself is housed in the lenses with speeds from 1second all the way to 1/500th and includes B. The backs are interchangeable and can use a special adapter to use standard Mamiya Press backs so allows access to 6x9 images on 120 film with the backs from a Mamiya Press, also in that range is 6x4.5, 6x6, 6x7.

From my brief experience so far, it seems a well made camera with a unique ability to use Fujifilm PackFilm and be in full control over focus and exposure.
The 127mm lens seems to be quite sharp and has decent rendering and can produce some nice out of focus rendering which would be useful for portraits.

Olympus Trip 35

The Olympus Trip 35 was made in Japan, it a rather nice compact viewfinder camera, equipped with a 40mm f2.8 lens, the camera works in auto exposure due to the selenium front ring it doesn't require batteries. Also it has a shutter blocker if the exposure falls beneath it's settings.

It operates at 1/200th in Auto mode and at 1/40th in flash mode where you change the aperture, the auto mode works well and the lens is nice and sharp. I once relied on the Trip as my Praktica was not working with the flash gun, the images came back nicely exposed and very sharp for such a small camera.

Overall it is a camera I could recommend to someone who is looking for a cheap decent film camera.

Nikon F3

The Nikon F3 is not like the previous "Pro" Nikons, as it relies on batteries for use at any speed other than 1/60th, which is the mechanical back-up speed.

Now, aside from the fact it requires batteries, it's fantastic to use, because all the metering circuits are in the body. This means that it allows the prisms to be compact and it can even meter with a waist level finder. The camera also features an "automatic" mode which is aperture priority based.  Personally, I didn't like the more modern styling at first, although I have grown to like it. The Nikon F3 is a very solid, high quality camera. This is due to the fact that the majority of parts are metal and very few parts are plastic. This makes the camera itself more durable, and increases the weight so that it is more sturdy to hold.

I have been using my Nikon F3 with a variety of films, mainly black and white and it is yet to let me down yet. I have been using a non-ai 50mm Nikkor-H which requires you to use stop down metering; this is a slight disadvantage, although I have been using Zenits which work in stop down metering. The Nikon, however is a much more refined camera.

The Nikon F3 is a very effective camera system. It has accessories ranging from interchangeable backs, focusing screens, viewfinders and a motordrive. On the whole, I enjoy using the Nikon F3, despite my initial dislike of the camera.

Canon AV-1

 Japanese made 35mm SLR that works in Aperture Priority mode, it uses the Canon FD mount which has been outdated so the lenses are fairly cheap

The Canon AV-1 is fairly light due to being made of metal coated plastics, it uses a needle in the viewfinder to show what speed it has selected, so far in use it has given perfect exposures, and I'm quite happy with the results

Since writing this I have sold the Canon AV-1 to my friend who collects Canon FD mount cameras

Nikon F

The Nikon F was Nikon's first professional SLR, it was basically a rangefinder with a prism grafted on the top, which allows for interchangeable prisms and viewfinders and focusing screens.

The plain prism now has a huge price increase as the metered prisms are slowly dying, it is still possible to find a working metered prism, however it is quite difficult to find one that works well.

The camera itself is very high quality, with a good range of shutter speeds (From 1 second to 1000th in conventional steps) The shutter is made of titanium, which was designed to stop the problems of the cloth shutter used in cameras like the Leicas, it would have been possible to burn a hole in the shutter if it was used in MLU and pointed toward the sun if they had used a cloth shutter.

To load the Nikon F you have to remove the bottom and the back which is one piece,which is locked in place by a turning key thing on the base.

The F has a self timer that can be set to three different times (I think they are 3,6 or 9 seconds) It has a Mirror Lock Up feature that does require you to lose a frame to activate it.