seven seventies

 

One Saturday with the winds blowing a gale and the rain lashing down outside I decided to do something photographic indoors. So I ran a simple lens test on seven of the seventies rangefinders in my collection.

 

Canonet GIII 17,  Minolta Hi-Matic E,  Olympus RD,  Olympus SP,  Yashica GT,  Yashica Lynx 14E,  and a Yashica MC.

 

I pinned a newspaper to a board and in the centre of that stuck an A4 printout of the USAF test chart, filling about the centre ninth of the resultant frame. I mounted the cameras on a tripod at 1 meter and used a roll of FP4 transferred to each in turn. On each camera I used the RF to focus for one frame and the measured distance for another. I used the camera’s own metering for a frame and a reading from a known accurate hand meter for another. I was happily surprised at the accuracy of these old camera’s auto exposure systems. But discovered a couple a rangefinders I’ll need to adjust!  After developing the film in Aculux 2 I scanned the frames with a Minolta Scan Dual at 2400 dpi and cropped to the centre portion of the USAF chart.

 

From previous experience of these cameras the results did not really surprise me. There’s not much between them but the Lynx comes out just about best on resolution closely followed by the GT.

Hardly a scientific test I know, but it made for an interesting few hours on a foul weather day

 

              
          

           Canonet GIII 1.7                  Minolta Hi-Matic  E                     Olympus RD

         

               Olympus SP                      Yashica Electro GT                  Yashica Lynx 14E   

        

     S        
     

          Yashica Electro MC                       Typical  frame