nostalghia said:
I wondered what those little slots were on the bottom/front of the body! a close-up attachment? never heard or found any info on this... i meant to ask what books you were looking at...
i think they also made a 135/4.5
Great story about how you got involved with Super A-ness! Although I get a lot of my info from the McKeown price guide (an old one; can't afford the new edition anymore!) and the Hove Blue Book (now extinct, I think) my Super A info came from the writing that got me interested in old cameras in the first place: Jason Schneider's "Camera Collector" columns in the old
Modern Photography magazine, and their collections in book form titled
Jason Schneider on Camera Collecting, Books I, II and III (yes, I have all three!)
Schneider's exposition of camera minutia isn't always 100% accurate (usually because subsequent researchers have unearthed data that wasn't available to him at the time) but overall his writeups are colorful, useful, and engaging. It was a mention in his Super A story (in Book II, I believe) that tipped me off that the slots are for a close-up attachment.
He makes no mention of a 135 lens for the Super A, but that could be one of those things he didn't know about at the time. (If there's a 135 for the Super A, it'll have to have a pretty long minimum focusing distance, because the focusing mount is built into the camera body... correct?)
Although it's great if you just want to enjoy taking pictures with your Super As and sharing your enthusiasm for them with the rest of us, this does point out an interesting direction: If you wanted, you probably could become a leading expert on them, just by spending some time digging up info such as what the close-up attachment looked like and how all the stuff works for picture-taking. Most big-city libraries will have old issues of
Popular Photography and
Modern Photography on microfilm, and back when I had more time for this type of thing I spent many happy afternoons in the microform department, spooling through issues from the '50s looking for test reports, news stories, or ads about cameras in which I was interested at the moment. You also can poke around at sales or on eBay watching out for manufacturer literature, in hopes of finding illustrations of obscure accessories and whatnot.
Often that's the only way nowadays to find out this kind of info. Of course, another way is to look for yourself -- that's how I learned about the Seikosha shutter's booster spring. I had always wondered why it sometimes was so hard to advance the film on my Minolta Autocord (which also had a Seikosha shutter) and later why it was likewise harder to cock the shutter on my folding Mamiya Six (ditto) when it was set to its highest speed. Finally I just took the front ring off and had a look, and there it was: a little extra shutter hairspring bearing against the blade-driving ring, with a bump on the other end that pushed it into engagement only when the fastest shutter speed was selected. This was a super-smart design on the part of Seikosha -- at all speeds except the seldom-used top one, you can cock the shutter against a softer main spring, and the booster spring is tensioned only when it's needed, so it's less likely to wear out prematurely.
Forcing the cocked spring into engagement by turning the ring, though (rather than setting it first and then cocking the shutter to tension it) required a lot of extra torque on the speed ring, and I could see how that might wear the cam and/or raise the risk of the spring snapping out of engagement... thus Minolta's directive that you select the top speed only when the shutter was uncocked, or so I surmise.
Finding out this kind of stuff is one reason old cameras are fun... especially when they also take excellent pictures!
