New Old Camera....O-Matic

 On my last trip out to finish up the roll of film in the Vivitar I broke the film rewind thingy. Since that particular thingy is also the release for the camera back, that film is stuck inside the camera until I can noodle something out. But that unfortunate circumstance was just the kick in the butt I needed to finally pull the trigger on another camera I’d been stalking on eBay, so all’s well that ends well.

Last week I took delivery of a Petri 7S, a rangefinder 35mm camera made in Japan in the 1960s. It looks like mine came from the earlier end of that run, so I’m thinking somewhere from 1963-1967. It’s not the artifact that the folding Brownie is, but it’s still older than me and I suppose that qualifies it as an antique. 

The Petri company was apparently a pretty big deal in its time, competing strongly with Canon and Nikon for the consumer camera market. It specialized in rangefinders, so between the consumer interest moving to SLRs and Petri’s lack of mass production capacity, by 1977 the company went out of business. But the cameras it did produce were really pretty nice. 

I was excited to try a rangefinder, and this one has a gimmick I couldn’t pass up, Green-o-Matic. In a rangefinder camera, there’s no mirror and you don’t look through the lens when looking in the viewfinder. Instead, there are two viewfinders and to focus you line both images from the viewfinders up until they overlap into one. In this camera, one viewfinder has a green tint making it easier to see both images and focus correctly, hence Green-o-Matic. I’m a sucker for any “o-matic”. 

The other feature that drew me to this particular camera was the light meter. Most cameras of this age had light meters powered by batteries, and the batteries they were made for are now illegal due to the environmental hazards posed by their ingredients. There are work arounds, but that seemed like a hassle. This camera has a light-powered light meter. The meter is selenium which I guess is kind of like a solar panel? I don’t completely understand the science, but the upshot is that the camera doesn’t need a battery and after 50 years the light meter works and seems to be accurate. And the meter sensor itself is a ring around the lens that ends up inside any filter you attach, so no manual adjustment for the filter is required. And as an added bonus, it takes the same filter size as the brand new 35mm Macro lens I bought for the Eos-R. 

That shiny bit around the lens is the self-powered light meter. Pretty genius for the 60’s

Aside from the two sort of gimmicky (but highly awesome and useful) features, the camera is pretty standard for its time. It has a shutter speed range from 1 second to 1/500th of a second plus a bulb setting. The Petri 7S came with one of two lenses and mine is the higher end with a 42mm lens that opens up to f1.8, which is pretty cool. 

There’s a cold shoe that holds a flash and the camera can sync with it. Also, it has a timer that I’m not certain works

The camera came earlier than the seller promised, so I’ve been sitting on it waiting for film since Sunday. Today the film will arrive, so I’m looking forward to putting this thing through its paces this weekend. And I have a plan for a little project this fall. More on that later :-)