My first serious camera as a teenager in the mid 1960s was a Microcord. It was recommended to me by a friend of my father who was a professional press photographer, and he told me it was as good as his Rolleiflex. They were more affordable on the secondhand market, and mine cost me £12. My results were sometimes excellent but I was usually plagued by dust on the glass plates necessary to hold the film flat on my enlarger. When I later moved to 35mm I used an enlarger with a glassless film carrier which was a big improvement, so I didn't notice too much drop in quality with the smaller but far more fashionable format.
Now that I have returned to photography after a very long interval, it is medium format which interests me most, so I've been buying all the cameras which I could only dream about as a teenager - Rolleis, Autocords, Mamiya, Bronica, YashicaMat etc etc. But of course Microcord and Microflex were near the top of the list, so now I have two of each. All but the early Microcords had the Prontor SVS shutter which is absolutely fine, but even my early Microcord 1 is still going strong. The lever wind Microflex did have a reputation for the unreliability of its wind mechanism, but that seems to have resulted from users not following the correct instructions for loading the film. One of my Microflexes did suffer a problem but it was easily fixed.
