Any information about this Rangefinder? (Kowa Kallo Wide)

p.giannakis

p.giannakis

Pan Giannakis
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Hi everyone,

Gone for my favourite charity shop walk yesterday and bought this camera for £10.

kowa%2Bkallo%2Bw.JPG


There is very little information available online. It has a Prominar 35 f/2.8 lens which seem to be in good condition. Slower speeds (1/2 and 1 sec) drag on a bit - the rest seem ok.

Has anyone got one of these? Any information online about it?
 
Interesting that Kowa made it?. I did a Yahoo search and found more there about your 1959 made camera. I would check there if I was you?
 
It's a "wide" (by the 1950's standard) version of the Kallo 35, made in 1955 by the Optical Product Division of Kofuku Sangyo Co., Ltd., the branch of Kowa which in its current incarnation still makes Prominar telescopes today. It's somewhat modeled after the Olympus 35 Wide, but the Kallo's Prominar lens has 6 elements in 4 groups.

Quality wise it's not a particularly special camera (numerous similarly-speced Japanese cameras soon flooded the market, much to the woe of the less established German manufacturers), but a fine instrument nonetheless.
 
I had a Graflex Century 35, which was basically the same camera except that it had a 45mm lens instead of a 35mm one. You might find more info searching for that camera?

As for general info, in the 1950s in Japan there was a wide-angle fad. Lots of wide-angle cameras were released. I have in my collection a Welmy Wide which catered to the low end of the market, there were a ton of them though, most of which didn't seem to be sold outside of Japan. Minolta, Walz, and I think Ricoh also got in on the action. The next camera fad was the half-frame which lasted a bit longer and got a lot more attention outside of Japan.
 
Funny fact: "Kowa kallo" means "Hard skull" in finnish, allthough the literary form changed to "kova" around mid-1800's.
Looks like it has a decent size finder. Nice catch!
 
http://3rd.geocities.jp/ta14hi/old-camera/Kowa/Kowa.htm
カロワイド　　１９５５年(昭和３０年)発売
レンズはプロミナーFC　F２．８　３５ｍｍ(４群６枚構成)　(4 groups, 6 elements)

I guess the performance of the lens won't be bad at all.

And later in the 70s-80s people got countless compact cameras with Tessar type 35mm/38mm lens...I just dislike that typical vignetting from those Tessar type wide-angles. It feels very cheap.
 
I've had a Kallo W for about 10 years and have always enjoyed its compact size and decent 35/2.8 Prominar. Kowa also made this lens for the Kallo or Kowa 140, interchangeable lens Seikosha shuttered camera from around 1959. Same optical formula and rare but not quite as rare as the LTM version.
An accessory Kallo viewfinder was also an option to put in the cold shoe and allow a much larger view, after focusing with the rangefinder in the camera.

I love the whole Kallo/Kowa rangefinder series, but I'm quite sure most remember only the bad and unreliable SLR models which followed. Darn nice lenses though

Gary Hill
 
p.giannakis said:
Wow, how did you compile all this information?
Click to expand...

I was searching for some lens information for my Yashicas and then saw someone posted some scanned pages of that book about lenses (ISBN 4-87956-043-X), with all those test results, I thought it would be useful so I made this chart based on the pages.
The tricky part was that all the names of the cameras and lenses were written in Japanese KANA instead of English alphabet :eek:...however a little bit of google translate helped the ones I didn't recognise.
 
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