England Microflex, any experience?

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I saw this TLR on the internet, I do not have first hand experience, anyone use one? how is the lens compare to Zeiss/Schneider/Minolta 's Tessar? I heard the shutter and winding system are fragile, I am try to find a broken one to disassemble to see the difference from Rollei, unfortunately, this model is rare in this side of the pond.
 
I've never owned one but have seen a couple. I think they have Taylor Hobson lenses which are probably the equal of any lens made in their time.
I had a Taylor Hobson enlarger lens in the late 1970's and always felt it was as good as the Rodenstock one I replaced it with.

Do some google searches for reliability-I don't know how it fares in that department.
 
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.
 
I have one... the lens is sublime, but somehow the mechanism it's bolted too isn't.. like many things British of this era, a good product spoilt by the pipe smoking committee who looked at the cost over function.
btw:: mine needs a major overhaul of the shutter and wind-on
 
I've never owned a Microflex myself - being a longtime user of the Rolleiflex - but I know several people who did in the past. The general consensus was - good lenses, not so good mechanicals.

They were an inferior copy of the concurrent Rolleis, brought to market shortly after WW2 when imported cameras were virtually unobtainable in the UK , and are not in the same league for reliability in longterm usage. The Microflex died when Rolleis became widely available - says it all, really (!)
 
rodt16s said:
I have one... the lens is sublime, but somehow the mechanism it's bolted too isn't.. like many things British of this era, a good product spoilt by the pipe smoking committee who looked at the cost over function.
btw:: mine needs a major overhaul of the shutter and wind-on
Click to expand...
Who were they? I never had the impression of 'a pipe-smoking committee' anywhere in the organization. I don't think Mr. Dell (whom I met in the 1970s) would have had much truck with them.

True, the shutter ain't much good but that was mostly a result of import restrictions. The lenses were, as you say, superb. I gave mine away because I just don't like TLRs too much.

To the OP: see http://www.mppusers.com/mppproducts.htm

Cheers,

R.
 
I wish I knew who to blame for the Microcord and Microflex mechanical problems. For an impecunious teenager in the 'sixties, they seemed like a godsend. The viewfinders compared well to the majority of cheap secondhand TLRs available at the time and the lenses really were good but I had two Microcord wind mechanisms die on me and my Microflex shutter was ideal if I only shot 50 ASA film, on account of being stuck at 1/50 by the second week I owned it.

On the other hand, they really were cheap...
 
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