Those that know Nicole and I know that we have what appears to be an on going camera acquisition problem. To remedy this but continue to try out ALL of the cameras we have decided to start borrowing cameras from our fellow camera enthusiasts instead of trying to purchase or hoard them all to ourselves. Not all are winners though and some are just easier or more fun to use but you have to shoot with them first to find out! Thus, we decided if we run a roll through every camera we are interested in, not unlike going on a 5 minute date with a bunch of strangers at a singles night, we can quickly see which are worthy of being added to our collection (or put on our list of “must haves.”) Camera speed dating!
Here is most recent camera I had the pleasure of a quick date with…the Honeywell Visimatic 615.
A little bit about the Honeywell Visimatic 615….this rangefinder camera seems to be a copy of the Petri Computor 35. It has a CdS cell mounted on the lens and a battery operated shutter. I found it’s rangefinder fairly easy to use but not entirely sure of the sharpness of the lens after shooting one roll with this camera. The first roll had some unsharp frames, and I’m not sure exactly why. Despite it being a mostly bright day, there were some that seemed to have a bit of camera shake or motion blur. In fact I shot two rolls, but the second was completely blank, I think due to dead batteries. Unfortunately this funny little camera makes the same odd shutter-sounding noise whether the shutter is opening or not and apparently it was not! I guess I did not notice that its orange and green lights were not lighting up. It always happens on a roll you actually cared a bit about too…
Like most of the small rangefinders of this era, it has a fully automatic setting, in this case “EE” and all you have to worry about is focusing. It does have an aperture priority mode as well if you want to use it, though it is mainly for if you have a flash mounted to the camera. The 3rd roll I shot as another test roll to see if it was in fact just a dead battery in the camera turned out just fine so I’m happy this little camera is still going strong. It was a very expired roll of film however, so the colour is pretty questionable!
Here are a few shots from the first roll…
And a couple from the 3rd “tester” roll, featuring very expired Kodak film…
