R
ruben
Guest
Today I sat for a cup of coffe with Mike Goldberg, a RFF member not particularly active for some long time.
He showed me his Bessa R which has a Jupiter-8 mounted on it. This was the first time I could actually see touch and hear a Bessa. What a surprise I got !
In fact I got several surprises. In the measure the following features apply to the other models that followed the Bessa R, be my coments extended to them too.
First of all, the camera looks very nicely countured. It happens, and it happened to me before, that you can see as many pics of a camera as you want, but the "real" one looks much beautifull than the one in the photos. The Bessa R looked quite smaller than what I imagined, slimmer and very very elegant.
So what do you do ? You look trough the viewfinder and hear the shutter.
The shutter seemed to me much more acceptable than what I imagined beforehand. Yet it was in a noisy coffee shop, so I cannot be more specific. Worse, Mike doesn't like leather cases and likes his cameras nude, unlike me. With a propper case the shutter noisy is supposed to be reduced.
The viewfinder striked me by two higly impressive features. The overal image is.... first class ? I don't know what adjective will be more appropriate but is dramatically clear and contrasty.
Here it will be of high interest to know if there is any Bessa with built in diopters, since when I looked through my glasses into the viewfinder, the high contrast went to the trash basket.
Perhaps it may be of interest to us, eye glass wearers, to know which kind of glasses should we look after when we go to the optometrician.
The second feature that I was positively surprised by was the frame lines for the 90mm focal length. It is much bigger than what I imagined it to be. It is good enough for everyone.
Yet one feature jumped immediately to my eyes, and not in the positive field: the patch. It is highly good and contrasty for most of the cases, but it could be better if instead of being of a clear cream/white/neutral tone it would be done in a dark yellow or any other no neutral color tone.
Why? When I pointed the camera to relatively bright light toned walls I felt a sense of "where am I ?" in terms of where to turn the focusing. This is the classic feeling Kiev users know when the two images to be superimposed are too far one from the other that you feel a bit lost.
It seems to me that in the case of the Bessa R the light tone of the patch becomes mixed with subjects of the same tone, and hence the confusion. But at the same time, let's not take this out of context. For all other situations its contrast and the second image contrast are both great great.
Finally, that small rewind crank is a cutty. The design of the shutter button is nothing less than highly good, although it could not hurt if the whole compound of shutter button and shied would both be bigger.
So far for the Bessa R. What a difference between seeing pictures and actually looking at a real one !
Cheers,
Ruben
He showed me his Bessa R which has a Jupiter-8 mounted on it. This was the first time I could actually see touch and hear a Bessa. What a surprise I got !
In fact I got several surprises. In the measure the following features apply to the other models that followed the Bessa R, be my coments extended to them too.
First of all, the camera looks very nicely countured. It happens, and it happened to me before, that you can see as many pics of a camera as you want, but the "real" one looks much beautifull than the one in the photos. The Bessa R looked quite smaller than what I imagined, slimmer and very very elegant.
So what do you do ? You look trough the viewfinder and hear the shutter.
The shutter seemed to me much more acceptable than what I imagined beforehand. Yet it was in a noisy coffee shop, so I cannot be more specific. Worse, Mike doesn't like leather cases and likes his cameras nude, unlike me. With a propper case the shutter noisy is supposed to be reduced.
The viewfinder striked me by two higly impressive features. The overal image is.... first class ? I don't know what adjective will be more appropriate but is dramatically clear and contrasty.
Here it will be of high interest to know if there is any Bessa with built in diopters, since when I looked through my glasses into the viewfinder, the high contrast went to the trash basket.
Perhaps it may be of interest to us, eye glass wearers, to know which kind of glasses should we look after when we go to the optometrician.
The second feature that I was positively surprised by was the frame lines for the 90mm focal length. It is much bigger than what I imagined it to be. It is good enough for everyone.
Yet one feature jumped immediately to my eyes, and not in the positive field: the patch. It is highly good and contrasty for most of the cases, but it could be better if instead of being of a clear cream/white/neutral tone it would be done in a dark yellow or any other no neutral color tone.
Why? When I pointed the camera to relatively bright light toned walls I felt a sense of "where am I ?" in terms of where to turn the focusing. This is the classic feeling Kiev users know when the two images to be superimposed are too far one from the other that you feel a bit lost.
It seems to me that in the case of the Bessa R the light tone of the patch becomes mixed with subjects of the same tone, and hence the confusion. But at the same time, let's not take this out of context. For all other situations its contrast and the second image contrast are both great great.
Finally, that small rewind crank is a cutty. The design of the shutter button is nothing less than highly good, although it could not hurt if the whole compound of shutter button and shied would both be bigger.
So far for the Bessa R. What a difference between seeing pictures and actually looking at a real one !
Cheers,
Ruben
Last edited by a moderator:
