Mamiya 7 Pano Adaptor Kit - Experience?

[sper]

I bought one! I'm very excited to use it. Unfortunately I only have the 80mm right now, but that's okay. Maybe some day I'll be able to afford the 50 or the 43mm.

Anyways does anybody have any experience or examples using this set up? Even on flickr it hard to find stuff. I'm considering it my poor man's x-pan.

 

[Johnmcd]

Here's a recent link of my experiences so far,

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93472

I think it's great fun and easy to use. I only have the 80mm.

Cheers - John

 

[sevo]

Works. But if you ask me, you'd better shoot 120 and crop it. The flaw of all these conversion kits is that the camera won't shrink. And unless you pick them up very cheap or shoot as much that you might as well have afforded a Xpan given the broken down cost per image, you won't recoup their cost in film...

 

[Johnmcd]

I disagree. For a number of reasons.

1. The pano kit for the Mamiya 7 cost me $80 brand new. Hardly expensive. For $80 I can now use 35mm film which gives me more film to choose from.
2. The Mamiya 7 is at least half the cost of an X Pan (in Australia).
3. The Mamiya 7 can take 120 and with the pano kit can take very acceptable 35mm pano. The X Pan just does 35mm pano.
4. I hardly think the X Pan is any smaller than the Mamiya 7, so you are not losing anything at all in that regard.

Don't get me wrong, I would love an X Pan (maybe one day) but I wouldn't swap it for a Mamiya 7 that (IMHO) is much more versatile.

Cheers - John

 

[sevo]

1. The pano kit for the Mamiya 7 cost me $80 brand new.

Good deal - I sold mine, used, for three times that amount. Still, the images are the same length, and film price differences by length are often surprisingly small - while AUS$80 seem very doable, you'd have to shoot a lot to recoup a 250€ expense.

Sevo

 

[Johnmcd]

I can understand at 250€, but at $80 AU for a new adaptor it really was a no brainer and I quite like the challenge of that format.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Mamiya-7-II-..._Photographic_Accessories&hash=item5ad97cf7cd

They are still available at $107. The price usually fluctuates with the price of the Aussie dollar.

Cheers - John

 

[martin s]

Good deal - I sold mine, used, for three times that amount. Still, the images are the same length, and film price differences by length are often surprisingly small - while AUS$80 seem very doable, you'd have to shoot a lot to recoup a 250€ expense.

Sevo

http://cgi.ebay.de/Mamiya-7-Panoram...mcorder_AnalogeKameras_PM&hash=item5889659d72

I was offered several for around 100 Euros.

martin

 

[sper]

I mean, no, the M7 is not a 35mm camera. I'm not really trying to save any money here. I'm just interested in shooting some panoramas. Cropping isn't the same, you waste all that film. I'd rather shoot a bunch pr tri-x and get nice grainy results.

I'm assuming the 80mm is 'normal'...so do I have to go to the 43mm to get a real wide angle?

 

[Doug]

One advantage of cropping is that you can choose your crop area higher or lower on the 120 film, not just from the center, so you get effective rise and fall of the lens in the bargain. Also, you lose virtually no negative area when you touch up slight errors in horizon tilt.

The big advantage to the kit, IMHO, is the greater selection of 35mm films.

I bought a pano kit for my Pentax 67. I found that my local pro lab did not have a mask to scan or print the 24x66mm frames. But they could do two overlapping scans of each frame for me to merge later in Photoshop. Something to check on your own scanner and/or lab.

Hopefully, the Mamiya kit is more convenient to use than my Chinese-made one, as it was a pain to use, loading and unloading in the dark. Even if I chose to have the film wind into an empty film cassette for daylight loading, that still meant the final exposure ruined when the back opened. All in all, an interesting experience! (below shot with 55/4)