Balda Baldix first results

[relistan]

A friend in England gave me two of her grandfather's cameras, and one of them was this great little folder, the Balda Baldix. Mine has the Enna Ennagon 3.5/75mm lens and the Prontor S shutter. The lens is not rangefinder-coupled on mine, though in some cases it is. I have never taken any medium format photos before, nor used a rangefinder for that matter, so this was all new territory. The whole roll came out smashingly! I haven't had time to scan more than this image, but here is one of the best from the roll. I shot Plus-X 125 on the recommendation of a guy at the vintage camera shop near my house. It definitely has a vintage look. Anyway, I love this camera!

Here's one shot, taken downtown in Portland, OR here. This has not been digitally processed and was scanned with my crummy scanner.

 

[robin a]

Very capable camera,enjoy it.............Robin

 

[hanskerensky]

Yes the Balda Baldix can be a nice folder. They were very popular in the fifthies.
I have one with the cheap Rigonar 1:4,5 75mm lens and another one with the Baltar 1:2,9 80mm.

There is a group dedicated to Balda cameras on Flickr. Have a look here :
http://www.flickr.com/groups/balda/

The Baldix with the (uncoupled) rangefinder is called the Mess-Baldix.
The Hapo 66E is almost the same but has another lens. Hapo stands for Hans Porst.

 

[relistan]

Thanks guys. Hans, I didn't know about that Flickr group so I'll see if I can post some photos there. I am going to get a better scanner to hopefully improve the quality of the scans. The above was from a print because the negatives look so terrible on this 6 year old low end scanner. I'll post some more photos here when I get a couple more scanned (hopefully with better upright lines that that top photo!)

I'm loving the camera, though. Very nice to use and easy to shoot with. It's actually smaller than most of my SLRs and easier to pack in my bag. I think I got pretty lucky being given this nice specimen, too.

Cheers,
Karl

 

[relistan]

Ok, I got a new scanner! It's a Canoscan 8400F ($65 from Newegg--the outgoing model, so...). The results are far superior to the old one. I was able to scan from the negatives and they look much much better. You can see the sky in the photo above. Anyway, here are a couple more shots. Hope you like them.

 

[FallisPhoto]

Nice photos -- and a very decent camera. Much better with the new film scanner too.

 

[relistan]

Andrew, yes it's the Mess-Baldix apparently. Hans up above ^^ pointed this out, as well. It actually says "Baldix" on it, not Mess-Baldix so that's what I had called it.

So the German-English dictionary tells me that "Mess-" is a prefix meaning "measuring" in German which makes sense if you consider that the Mess-Baldix has a rangefinder and the regular Baldix doesn't.

Cheers,
Karl

 

[relistan]

NO problem. 🙂 That explains the E in German camera models, then, thanks for that info!

Karl