This is the first in what will — hope­fully — be many posts about the cam­eras that I have been col­lect­ing over the years. Present count today is some­where around 25 cam­eras, from the early 20th Cen­tury to only months old, both film and digital, SLR, TLR, Rangefind­ers, Folders and more.

The cam­era up today is the Olym­pus Chrome Six III B. It’s a Medium Format Fold­ing cam­era first intro­duced in 1948, the revi­sion III (below) was intro­duced in May 1952. The biggest dif­fer­ence between the earlier II model was the intro­duc­tion of a ‘film plane cor­rector’ to improve the pre­ci­sion of the film pos­i­tion. The ‘B’ denotes the fact that it has the faster 75mm ƒ2.8 lens, and not the ƒ3.5.

My Olym­pus Chrome Six was handed down to me from Jen’s Grand­father. Appar­ently it was used heav­ily at all sorts of occa­sions over the past half a cen­tury, but the con­di­tion is so near to per­fect that you could barely tell. The most dis­tin­guish­ing fea­ture of this par­tic­u­lar Chrome Six is the text ‘MADE IN OCCUPIED JAPAN’ that runs down the back latch of the cam­era. A reas­on­ably com­mon fea­ture on many objects man­u­fac­tured in Japan dur­ing the period between the end of WWII and April 18, 1952.

Per­son­ally, my favour­ite part of this cam­era is the fast (in the Medium Format world) ƒ2.8 lens. The field of view of the 75mm lens is roughly equi­val­ent to 50mm on a 35mm — or a Full-frame digital — cam­era, and at full aper­ture it has quite a nar­row depth of field. The qual­ity of the F.C. (coated on all ele­ments) glass is excel­lent, and in fact the only neg­at­ive with a cam­era such as this is the rel­at­ively slow 1–200 speed of the Copal shut­ter. How­ever, leaf shut­ters do have some advant­ages over focal plane shut­ters in that they can flash sync at any avail­able shut­ter speed, and are gen­er­ally quieter.

In short, this is a great cam­era if you’re look­ing to get star­ted in the world of Medium Format film. It’s cheap, very easy to use, has great optics, and is even thin­ner (albeit heav­ier) than most modern-day dSLRs.