Rollei 35S

I always wanted a Rollei 35 and now I've got one. Mine is a Rollei 35S, the one "made in Singapore" with the famous 40mm Sonnar f2.8. The label may put some people off, but acccording to many this is one of the best versions.

Rollei's aim was to produce a compact, but professional quality 35mm camera, and the result is an engineering marvel. My version is in pristine working condition although almost 40 years old.

Engineering is not the only thing that distinguishes it. Design wise it is unique - an upside-down back-to-front original. The Robin Williams of 35mm. Lots of other people have written about this, but here's a recap.

The film advance lever is on the left, the shutter release on the right. Obviously this is so you don't need a motor drive, as your fingers go left-right-left-right... hmmmm probably not. My guess is that it was an engineering decision. This means that the film winds on from right to left as well so when you put it in the scanner it will be upside down compared with proper cameras.

The aperture and shutter speed dials are on the front, not on the top like a proper camera. I've heard various arguments about this, like when you look down at the top of the camera you can see the values on the dials on the front, but em.. I think that would work if they were on the top.

It looks like all efforts were made to remove everything from the top of the camera. Favourite one for giggles is that the flash hot shoe is on the bottom. This notwithstanding the fact that the bottom of the camera is a veritable engineers workshop of bits and pieces.

I could go on, and probably will in future pieces, however just for starters here are some pictures from my first roll (FP4).

Pretty good I thought when it popped up. This is a full frame shot, originally scanned at 4000dpi, reduced here obviously for display. Nice contrast and gradations - never mind about the compositional oddities.

This is a fullsize crop from the original - 525x525 pixels. As you can see the limiting factor of the 40mm Sonnar is just film grain.

Here's another one showing nice crispness across the frame, and good tones as well.

So - what's the moral? Throw away all our new stuff? Of course not, but its interesting to note that as far as photography goes, the holy grail of technical progress and that ever better camera makes only a small difference to the photographs that you can produce. More important I think is how you feel about using the camera, how does it handle in different shooting situations etc. For this the little Rollei is a gem and has it's place in my arsenal of tricks. Especially given that it's as small as most digital point and shoots