And now a few of my impressions of the Ikon so far.
Well of course the most noticable difference between the Zeiss and the other rangefinders I've owned - M4-2, M2 & R2A - is feel in the hands. It lies somewhere between the R2A and M4-2 in terms of heft and sturdiness, but has an economic sparseness of design which is even more apparant than the M4-2, no easy feat.
A lot of it comes down to two things, both the weight of the camera - which is only marginally more than the R2A - and the shape which is a very slightly rounded rectangle, unlike the angle corners of the R2A or completely rounded edges of the the M4-2 & M2.
This tends to make the Ikon feel more utilitarian than the other cameras, but also a little more 'bold' in it's simplicity. I can't really say any more than that right now as I'm still getting used to the feel of the camera to be honest.
Film loading is by far the simplest and best of any rangefinder I've owned.
The back is incredibly fast and simple to open, and the film leader is tucked into the spool on the right after being stretched across the shutter, after which the back can be closed and the camera is 'ready to rock'.
Time will tell if I have any 'false starts' loading film, but I wouldn't imagine so given the design.
Rewinding film is done via the bottom rewind crank which feels sturdy enough, but the actual rewinding process doesn't feel as smooth as that of the Leicas. It's somewhere in between the M4-2 and R2A in terms of smoothness.
The viewfinder is of course amazing.
It's noticably larger than those of the Leicas, to the extent that the 35mm frame on the Ikon feels about the same as looking through the 50mm frame on the M2! The viewfinder is also significantly brighter than any other I've used, perhaps on par with an MP.
The shutter speeds are represented by red LED numbers on the far left hand side of the viewfinder, and are both good and bad. Good in the sense that they are out of the way and will not block composition, but bad in the sense that it's often necessary to move one's eye slightly to the right to see them clearly. It is however quite easy to see when the red '2000' LED is flashing, which indicates that it's necessary to use a smaller aperture to avoid overexposure.
The only significant downside of the viewfinder is that it much more important to place your eye in the correct position to see the rangefinder patch properly. Because the viewfinder is so large, it's very easy to move your eye slightly to the left or right, in which case the viewfinder patch will dim and focusing becomes impossible. Already I'm falling into the habit of positioning my eye correctly when I bring the camera up to take a shot, but there is still the chance of missing a shot due to incorrect eye positioning if it's a difficult situation and I'm in a hurry.
I'm probably being a little harsh in mentioning this, as I can't see how it'd be possible to design a rangefinder with such a large viewfinder and not encounter this dilemma.
The shutter is metal rather than cloth, and in terms of volume lies between that of the M4-2 and the R2A. Essentially it sounds much like an R2A at say, 50% of the volume, yet the mechanical nature of the sound is still apparent. I haven't done nearly enough shooting to asses how much of a difference this will make compared with the M2 I was using.
The actual shutter button has a lock around it which is rather handy to avoid tripping the shutter by accident when the camera is jiggled around inside a bag. The downwards movement of the button itself is somewhat disappointing, in that it feels stiffer than the shutter release of the R2A, and much, much more so than either of the Leicas. Time will tell if it loosens up at all, or has any effect on my shots in terms of preventing shooting at slower shutter speeds. (I doubt it, but you never know)
The film advance is better than I'd imagined and surprisingly I prefer it to that of the M2.
Firstly, it's made entirely of metal, yet is somewhat thicker than the M2's advance and feels a little more solid. The action of advancing the film is amazingly even smoother than the Leica's, and far, far more so than on the R2A.
Another great feature is the film counter, which is my favourite of any rangefinder I've seen so far. It's a small window which contains very large, easy to read numbers in groups of two (eg. 32, 34, 36) and automatically resets when the back is opened.
Shutter speed dial is about the same size as that of the R2A and features manual setting of film speed, aperture priority mode, bulb, and all the shutter speeds. Exposure compensation from -2 to +2 is present in 1/3 stop increments. The back of the camera also has a small exposure lock button that's easily reached.
Well that about covers all or most of the things worth discussing about the Zeiss Ikon, so to summarise - The Ikon seems like a very well built camera with a minimalist, utilitarian appearance that belies a very carefully considered design. Aside from a slightly noisier shutter than that of the Leica M's there are really no downsides to the design, and I can see myself being very happy using it for quite some time.
