In 2021, a vey small club got two new small members. Let’s call it the Fast Forty Club. The Nikkor Z 40mm f/2, at 170 g, was and remains the only lightweight normal-ish prime that Nikon has on offer for its mirrorless mount. Though its MSRP of $300 is already low by current standards, you can now get it new for around 200 USD/EUR, which could easily be less than the sales tax on your fancy new camera.   

Sony’s FE 40mm f/2.5 G was announced alongside the similarly-sized 50mm f/2.5 G, so in one swoop Sony added two compact normalish lenses to its lineup. Until that point, the only other similarly-lightweight native option was the aging 50mm f/1.8, a value play that makes a number of sacrifices to hit its low price. The “G” in this lens’s name is Sony’s way of suggesting that it cuts fewer corners. Despite the modest maximal aperture and 172 g weight, this is a premium lens: twin linear AF motors, metal (probably aluminum) body construction, aperture ring, function button, focus mode switch, and (one hopes) strong optical performance. Sony can tick these boxes because the MSRP is a rather rich $800, and as I write this it’s on “sale” at B&H for $750. I got a better deal on mine in France with a Black Friday combo deal on a Sony A7C II, where it contributed maybe 500 EUR to the price. Still not cheap for a lens with modest optical specs.

Cheap Apples vs Expensive Apples

I’m going to get into my usual digressions later, but I’ll cut to the chase up front for a change and just tell you: Nikon’s 40mm might not be quite as “good” as Sony’s, but it’s still very good. Some could argue pitting lenses with a 3 to 4x price delta against each other is comparing apples and oranges, but impressively, these are both apples. You could bake either one into a pie and it would be tasty.  

I shot the Nikon on a Z6 II and the Sony on my new A7C II and put the raw files through DxO PhotoLab, “adjusted to taste” as they say on DPreview. PhotoLab obviously has profiles on both lenses and no doubt corrects basic distortion and whatever aberrations it can clean up, and the bodies themselves might also be pre-cooking the raws. Then I realized my apple pies actually weren’t really comparable because I’d baked them in different ovens: the 24 megapixel wood-fired stove of the Nikon vs the 33 megapixel convection oven of the Sony. You can’t just down-res the larger file, that would be like microwaving the pie after you cooked it… OK, I’ll drop the metaphor. This isn’t a serious test, anyway.

How not serious? Well, for my near-infinity sharpness test, I didn’t realize the Z6 II had missed focus until after I returned the lens. Check this out:

Maybe I’ll allow a brief digression here to say that if you feel spiritually drawn to Nikon because it’s a camera maker that by-and-large seems to understand how photographers want to interact with their machines, but you’re just not sure about the AF performance of the company’s early Z-mount cameras… you’re right to be concerned. I bought the Z6 II to investigate this question, and found that while its AF is serviceable, it’s a full step behind the best from Sony. It’s not broken, it’s not terrible, it’s a thousand times better than what I accepted as pretty good twenty years ago, but if you want tracking AF that just mindlessly works almost all the time (which is what Sony has offered for a several years now) this isn’t it. By all accounts the latest generation of Nikon bodies (Z8, Z9, Z6 III, Z5 II) largely redresses this imbalance, but you’ll have to wait for them to lose a lot of resale value before you’ll hear about it from me.

Anyway, apart from tracking AF choke-ups, the Z6 II can apparently still just miss focus on static targets. The sample above was shot was in AF-S mode, with the square smack on that street light. The Sony hit it, which is nothing to brag about. The Z6 II missed both shots I took, focusing on the deeper background, and worse, to differing degrees, though the mistakes weren’t obvious in the moment.

But looking at that background, we see that central sharpness is good, so I can say that at longer distances, both lenses do a good job of resolving what they’re focused on, and that remains largely true right into the corners, even wide open. If common sense and people with real testing equipment are to be believed, MTF figures for both lenses are not actually the same across the whole frame. But I would be hard-pressed to see a difference with artistic/practical importance at realistic magnifications in either lens.

I keep vignetting compensation turned off in PhotoLab because I’m old-school like that, so I saw that the Nikkor shows really noticeable falloff at f/2. If that’s not your thing, the correction can be done automatically, but at the risk of a noise penalty. By f/2.5, the corners have brightened to more or less match the Sony. There’s also the possibility that the Sony is pre-brightening the raw file (the Nikon body might as well, concealing even graver sins in the lens design — such is the modern world that one is never quite sure about these things).

In the damp, cold two weeks I had the Nikkor I wasn’t doing any landscape photography so unfortunately that test shot out my window is all I’ve got to show you for longer distance. Closer up the lens continues to hold its own against the Sony. Behold:

Use your imagination to compensate for the minor increase in linear resolution that the Sony’s denser sensor captures along with an fudge factor due to the fact that I wasn’t using a tripod to lock in the shooting position and I think you’ll agree that wide-open, both lenses do a good job resolving detail just a bit off-center here. I don’t worry about corner sharpness at portrait distances and closer because I’m not doing any repro work or archival wall documenting. 

I also tried the Nikon at f/2.5, and lo, it looks softer than wide-open because the camera misfocused. I’m not sure what the camera was going for but the plane of focus seems just slightly in front of everything in the scene. The books in the crop only look out of focus when compared to the perfectly sharp results from the Sony, but seeing the large amount of blur on items deeper on the shelves in the Nikon image makes it clear what happened.

Modern tastes preclude shooting at anything but wide-open so that’s all the stopping down we’ll do for now. In that vein, what about bokeh? Sony’s marketing explicitly points up out-of-focus rendering as a strength of its 40mm. Of course, what that means if hard to define.

The disco-inspired still life above gives some ideas about how the lenses handle out-of-focus backgrounds. I’d rate the overall rendering as fairly smooth, though this isn’t a torture test. The monstera on the left doesn’t look too busy. The Nikon manages a bit “more” blur since its light hole is that much bigger.

Let’s look at the background highlights:

The Christmas lights in the background show green outlines with both lenses, a symptom of uncorrected longitudinal chromatic aberration. Doesn’t much bother me. The Sony shows much more optical vignetting (the cats-eye shape of the bokeh balls, which becomes more pronounced towards the edge of the frame as the lens barrel shades out incoming light). Both lenses, unsurprisingly, resort to the dark arts of aspherical elements to achieve modern performance levels: the Nikon has two, the Sony three. Maybe that 50% increase explains why the Sony shows a lot more onion-ring patterning in its bokeh balls, or maybe Nikon just has more old-school optical fairy dust to spread around, I don’t know. Overall I prefer the Nikon’s OOF rendering here, but only as a connoisseur: in practice, I can’t see it making much difference.

Conclusion

Bottom line: these are both good lenses. The Nikon is more significant in the context of Nikon’s Z system as the only lightweight, fast prime in its range, which damns the depth of the Z lineup and/or illustrates the general trend towards spec-monster primes that privilege speed and performance over practicality and cost. Even the modestly fast Nikkor Z 50mm 1.8 is pretty chonky, albeit reputedly excellent wide-open. If I were seriously looking at the Z system, this 40mm could make the difference between buying in or not. It helps offset the lack of a truly compact, lightweight Z-mount photo-centric camera.

The Sony is probably a hair “better” by the numbers and is more satisfying as a well-built object, but costs way more and is far less critical to the health of the E-mount lens ecosystem, which is an embarrassment of riches. Paired with the impressively compact and lightweight A7c cameras, this lens (along with the 50mm 2.5) makes a good argument against APS-C bodies for people who prioritize this field of view. You pay essentially nothing for the larger sensor except for, well, quite a lot of money. Size and weight-wise, there’s nothing to distinguish this setup from the APS-C A6700 with the Sony 35mm 1.8 OSS, a lens that’s also extremely long in the tooth, hailing from a time before linear focus motors and weather sealing were de rigeuer.

Tween or Taint?

With the rigorous testing out the way, let me philosophize a bit about the 40mm lens as a genre. I have long been a 50mm man, ever since a mix of zoom-ennui, artistic pretentions, physical laziness and rangefinderphilia drove me to primes over a decade ago. When men were men and zooms were for dilettantes, 35mm was wide, 50mm was normal, and 90 to 135mm was all the tele you needed. But of course there were other focal lengths to be had, and many systems featured a fastish forty.

Something about this focal length, when covering the 35mm frame, allows for extremely compact lens designs. I don’t understand optics well enough to know why, but just as animals keep evolving into crabs, 40mm lens design bends towards the pancake: consider the Pentax 40mm f/2.8 in K mount, the Canon EF 40mm 2.8, the Olympus 40mm f/2, the Konica 40mm 1.8 in AR, and the Leica 40mm Summicron in M mount. I suspect the same optical principle also underpins the tiny Panasonic 20mm f/2 for Micro Four Thirds, which of course has a 40mm-equivalent field of view. A number of fixed-lens rangefinders from the heyday of that camera class also sported 40-45mm lenses.

With the exception of the Konica, which was the AR system’s standard lens, and the 40mm Summicron, which was made as the kit lens for the compact Leica CL, these were extremely optional lenses. The Olympus 40mm, apparently considered quite meh in its time, now sells for more than 10x the price of the contemporary standard Oly 50mm because of its rarity.

The Sony and Nikon lenses discussed here are of course not “pancakes,” a class of lens that has largely gone extinct, presumably under the modern pressure to deliver corner-to-corner sharpness on high-res sensors. But they are certainly far smaller than many high-performance contemporary 35 and 50mm primes, some of which could be mistaken at a glance for constant aperture zooms of yesteryear.

Plonked between the stalwart 35mm and 50mm focal lengths, the 40 is certainly a tween. But is it a ‘taint? My personal experience so far suggests it really does offer a useful middle ground, handling one- and two-person scenes better than the wider 35mm while feeling less constraining than the tighter 50mm for groups, interiors, and general-purpose photography. Modern sensors also mean that you can crop down to a 50mm equivalent FoV with quality to spare. I’m certainly not ready to give up on 50mm — if only because that would make my full-back tattoo of the 50mm Summicron rigid feel like a mistake — but there’s a versatility to the 40mm field of view that is worth exploring. I suspect many 50mm devotees who find 35 too wide for general use would also enjoy stepping out with a 40mm for a change.

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Remember how, when music came on CDs, there was sometimes that hidden bit that started after an extended silence following the last song? A weird remix, jangling sounds, heavy breathing? Well, this is the blog post equivalent, in which I will consider the meaning of a “normal” focal length.

You will find two ideas of what a “normal” lens is on the internet. Most discussions posit that for the classic 35mm film format (digital “full-frame,” don’t get me started), a 50mm lens is considered normal because its field of view somehow approximates the normal way humans see the world. I probably read this a hundred times, and took thousands of photos with the 50mm field of view, before I noticed that the evidence of my own eyes flagrantly contradicts this supposition. A healthy human, even with our foward-focused predatory eye set-up, sees much more than the approximate 40 degree horizontal span of a 50mm lens (most “50mm” lenses are actually a bit longer than the nominal focal length, too). Don’t take my word for it: hold you finger out in front of your face and then swing your arm out while keeping your gaze fixed forward. When you arm is straight out to the side, wiggle your finger. You’ll see it moving over there, suggesting that your actual field of view covers close to 180 degrees. No, you can’t read a newspaper 90 degrees off axis, but you can see something. But our experiential field of view can also be much narrower than 40 degrees, such as when cannonballing down the autobahn at 100 miles per hour. This all points to the fact that eyes aren’t cameras: what we experience as “vision’ is really a patchwork of image flashes as our eyes saccade around the scene augmented with a healthy dose of imagination.

The other definition of “normal” one encounters is mathematical, stating that the normal focal length for a given format is equal to the diagonal of the frame. For classic 35mm, that’s about 43mm. That gives a FoV a good bit wider than a nifty fifty. I have seen various attempts to explain why this normal is good, but nothing convincing, though I agree that it provides a useful field of view as discussed above. I prefer this definition because it’s doesn’t read like a patently counter-factual AI hallucination.

Who cares? No one sane, probably, but I think it’s interesting that notions of normal are probably influenced as much by hundred-year-old lens design limitations (a fast, 50ish double gauss with strong performance was more practical to make than a 40ish lens with similar performance) as any spiritual connection to the way humans see the world. And now that you can have great performance at a reasonably price at virtually any focal length, maybe it’s time to reconsider, as we have in so many other spheres, what is normal anyway.

And now imagine the sound of the CD player’s laser transport whirring softly back to park by the spindle.

As the criminals pin on their badges and the clowns take over the books at the circus, let’s consider the Sony a6400, specifically from the point of view of those of us who have long wandered the wilderness. We who pitch our lot with the outsiders of the camera world — Olympus, Fuji, Panasonic, Pentax et al. — have our reasons. But as we enjoy the compactness of a micro four-thirds system, the delightful tactility of a Fuji, the full-frame value of a Panasonic, we might wonder: what are we missing? Besides the obvious — the respect of our peers, the adulation of attractive strangers — we have our suspicions, and chief among them: good fancy autofocus. By fancy I mean the modern niceties like sticky tracking, effective face and eye detection, all that.

Third Party Candidates

Canon and Sony have long been the acknowledged leaders of the autofocus race. It sounds like Nikon might be finally catching up with the system that debuted in the top-end Z9 and should trickle down soon enough, but we are in the unremitting now. The rest are, variously, behind. I have years of experience with the Olympus E-M5 III, a camera reborn essentially unchanged as the current OM Systems OM5, and I can attest that although it does snap focus pretty quickly to a given spot in a way that would have astounded me 20 years ago, the modern niceties of tracking autofocus are present in name only. The camera is very good at putting a green box on something and does a good impression of keeping it there as the something moves around, but despite the reassuring verdancy of the AF lock, the camera seems mostly blind to changes in subject distance. The classic thing of a kid running towards you? Not happening. The ground well behind them will be sharp as a tack, though. 

My experience with the Panasonic S1, the current-though-aging full-frame flagship of that brand, was better, but still left something to be desired. The human subject identification was impressive, and the tracking box was stickier, but it still sometimes struggled to track humans through the Z axis, though it was loads better than the E-M5 III. (The S1 was the last high-end Panny without phase detection pixels and I haven’t used the PDAF-blessed S5 or S5 II, but I know from the E-M5 III that phase detect doesn’t automagically make for competent AF). 

The Fuji X-H2, also a current flagship, was better still at tracking (though maybe a bit less impressive in the subject detection area). Better, but still... Just after I sold it Fuji released yet another firmware tweak to improve AF. Reports suggest it does so, but not in a game-changing way.

After dallying with these larger cameras, I was ready to go light again. Olympus has apparently made some progress with the AF on its OM-1 series, but I’ve been burned too many times. I didn’t want something approaching the state of the art. I wanted the real thing. 

Canon’s APS-C lens lineup feels like a contractual obligation rather than a serious effort, so I had to go with Sony, which still has a respectable APS-C 35mm f/1.8 in its portfolio left over from the pre-full-frame days. The very best AF from Sony still means full frame, but with camera prices rising in inverse proportion to the health of American democracy, I realized the best from Sony was a bit rich for me even if I wanted to carry the heft of an a7C II or a7 IV, which I don’t. Luckily, you can get almost-best for a lot less weight and money. 

Sony AF vs Olympus, Panasonic and Fuji

Behold the a6400. This is still a current model (mine was made in 2024) despite being introduced before the pandemic — Sony recently gave the top end of its APS-C lineup a bump with the a6700, but the mid-range a6400 and the entry level a6100 are still here. The a6400 AF tech borrows heavily from the a7 III, which itself uses a system derived from the pro-specced a9. This generation was a quantum leap forward in AF performance for Sony bodies. I recently had an a7 II on hand, and though the image and build quality are great, the tracking AF feels utterly broken if you’re coming from these more recent cameras. This is hardly a hot take. DP Review’s Carey Rose fairly gushed in his a6400 review: “With the acknowledgment that we may be laboring the point here, Sony's Real-time Tracking AF that basically 'includes' Eye AF is among the best autofocus implementations we've ever seen, and is capable of truly impressive results.” 

This is not fake news. At least for my use case (mostly family documenting), the a6400 basically solves the problem of AF. I no longer use back-button focusing — I just put the AF box on the subject, half-press, and recompose. The box sticks to the subject and the lens focuses on it. Misses are rare enough that I don’t worry about it.

With my EM-5 III, this was an utterly frustrating approach, as the AF system either pretended to focus when it didn’t, or spastically jumped around the scene. With the S1 and X-H2, it was much better, but I still wanted that back button so I could easily lock AF when it was where I thought it should be, as there was no guarantee it wouldn’t suddenly jump somewhere else at the wrong instant. This was less true when those cameras’ more advanced subject detection kicked in; the S1 in particular was good at finding people, even from behind. But arbitrary target tracking with those cameras, while massively more capable than the Oly and genuinely useful, was glitchy enough to be irritating. 

Thinking Machines Mean Peace and Prosperity!

The a6400’s basic AF chops are indisputable, and the way it seamlessly transitions in and out of face detection is great. I do however suspect that the addition of more advanced subject detection to the more recent AF implementation in the a6700 is helpful if it pays attention to people. I don’t give a hoot about cameras recognizing trains, birds, or planes (especially if those modes need to be explicitly engaged) but the brawny human subject detection that I tasted with the recent Panasonic and Fuji cameras would pair very nicely with the fundamentally capable tracking AF in the a6400. The a6400 does a great job of finding head-on faces and picking an eye to lock onto at closer distances, and it makes a game effort with profiles, but the S1 and X-H2 were more robust at finding faces from most any angle (and the S1 was particularly good at the backs of heads). Without any stats to back it up, though, I do think those other systems hallucinate faces more than the a6400, though not as badly as my old Olympus, which never met foliage that didn’t have a smiling face hidden in it. 

Sacrifice, Sacrifice

If you want tier one AF in a sub-500 gram body, I don’t think there are any alternatives to the a6400 right now. And by current standards, it’s not even expensive! But you do have to make some sacrifices. They are, in semi-decreasing order of importance:

In-body Stabilization. If you want it, you have to step up to the a6600/a6700, or an a7C. That means 20 percent more weight, and more spending. On the other hand, Sony makes quite a few stabilized APS-C lenses from back before IBIS went mainstream.

EVF. You get one, but it’s basic. Coming from my Panasonic S1 and Fuji X-H2, which have some of the best EVFs available, is a bit like finding yourself in coach after getting used to first class. But the adjustment was not as hard as I’d feared. As with air travel, everyone gets to the same place. The EVF is noticeably better than the tiny one in the a7C, so there’s that.

One Main Control Wheel. This gets reviewers in a froth, and at one point I would have found it unacceptable. But I’m getting more relaxed with age. The a6400 has a nice auto ISO implementation with easy access to modified shutter speed calculations, so I almost never set sensitivity manually. I usually shoot in aperture priority, and I don’t need to change exposure comp much — I just switch between standard matrix metering and highlight priority when I want to make sure things aren’t blowing out. I’m not even above clicking over to Program mode if the mood takes me. 

Micro USB. When the a6400 superseded 2016’s a6300, Sony couldn’t be bothered to update the port to USB C. Every time I think I’ve finally flushed micro USB out of my life, it claws back in. I bought a used Sony battery charger because I refuse to defile myself with micro USB cables. If you do the same, watch out for the many counterfeit “Sony” chargers out there, which don’t communicate with the battery during charging and will shave cycles off its life.

Otherwise, there’s not much to complain about. Image quality remains competitive even if it may slightly trail the 40 MP sensors in Fuji’s latest cameras on paper. The mag-alloy body is nice and solid. Some reviewers say it feels cheap because people are losing the ability to assess quality with their fingertips. As someone who has a handled literally hundreds of old, beautifully made cameras, I know what I’m talking about. Button and knob feel is totally acceptable. And despite Sony’s bad rep, I haven’t noticed any more lagginess than in my last several digital cameras from other makers. 

We All Grope Blindly, Alone (or, Why AF Benchmarks are Rare and Fantastical)

So here you have another anecdotal report of AF performance, hopefully slightly more helpful than some because of its comparison to specific cameras in specific situations, but ultimately far less complete than what you can know about a sensor from a few key numbers. Sure, the a6400 follows my kids’ faces, but what if your kids are less ideal than mine? How ideal do they need to be to hold the a6400’s hungry eye? What if they like to wear funny hats or ruffled collars? Despite the impression you might get from Instagram, in the real world the same scene is never photographed twice. How can we generalize a camera’s AF performance from specific inputs when the scenes it will encounter are infinitely variable?

The short answer is that we can’t, so most reviewers barely try. I tip my hat to the few that do,  but their efforts mostly underscore the futility of the task. DPreview sends a bicyclist careening towards the camera. Different bicyclists, in different lighting, riding similar but necessarily different tracks. RTings.com, which sounds like a content farm but is arguably the most systematic camera review site out there now, has a guy run and jump across a confusing background of headphones hanging on a wall (I guess because they also review headphones). They even boil down the performance to a single number, which is of course what everyone wants even though it can’t possibly communicate the hugely multi-variate difference between modern AF systems.

Imagine that cell phones had never sprouted lenses and the camera market was still cooking like it was 2010. The reviews ecosystem continued to mature along with the technology. Then we might find ourselves with the resources that were once poured into dissecting the noise performance of sensors redirected into the final frontier of camera performance differentiation: autofocus. Maybe DPReview would have a Rube Goldberg machine that propelled mannequins through perfectly repeatable trajectories under controlled lighting, robotic gymbals flying test cameras through synthetic sports, family, and wildlife scenes. 

The thing is that even if fully consistent testing was possible, it would still be of limited use because any test scenario would never coincide with the thousands of scenes you actually photographed yourself. The mannequins would not have the faces of your family. Some generalization would be possible, but it would always be uncertain.

Testing protocols aside, there’s also the question of the lens’s role in AF performance, which is something that reviewers almost uniformly pretend does not exist. Camera and lens work hand in glove to achieve focus, and not all lenses are created equal. For example, Sony’s FE 50 1.8 is famously slow to focus, and the most capable body in the world won’t change that. Comparing it to one of Sony’s G Master lenses that pack a bunch of linear motors with the oomph of a rail gun is like comparing apples to hand grenades. But reviewers often talk about “AF speed” without even mentioning what lenses they’ve used for testing.

My remarks here are mostly based on the Sony 35mm f/1.8 OSS lens, but I’ve also tried the underrated PZ 16-50, the GM 24-70, and the Zeiss 55 1.8 and 35 1.4. My X-H2 almost always wore the XF 35 2, and my S1 took the Panny 50 1.8. Oh, quick PSA — do NOT buy a Sigma 30mm f/2.8 lens for this or any modern Sony body if you care about AF performance. These lenses predate Sony’s adoption of phase detect AF, and on newer cameras PDAF only works in the very center of the sensor, which completely breaks tracking AF.

Is the a6400 Worth it in 2025?

Please excuse the SEO subhead, but I certainly think so. If you want really good AF in a very small, lightweight package for not a lot of money, this is the way. There are small cameras with more personality from Fuji, OM Systems (Olympus), and Panasonic, but you trade AF performance for things like nicer viewfinders and more control points. Depending on your priorities, that tradeoff could certainly make sense. If it doesn’t, I don’t think the a6400 will disappoint. 

My wife doesn’t like clocks in general, and reserves a special objection for the kind that insist on glowing redly in the bedroom. I on the other hand want to orient myself in the night, to calculate my desperation when sleep will not come. In the past I have made do with a phone, but a phone is not a watch or a clock; it just does a poor impression of both.

If the lume on my Casio S100 is fully charged at bedtime it will be just barely visible in the early morning, but it’s dim enough that I misread the hour. My first thought to solve this privileged problem was a Timex with Indiglo, that electroluminescent staple of the 90s. But Timex three-handers are notoriously loud tickers, so that was out. Then I thought maybe a basic quartz LCD Casio with a backlight. The cool kids are wearing these now and there’s a logical honesty about the designs, but that doesn’t change their essential gracelessness, and you have to press a button to light them up, or faff with reportedly unreliable “auto light” features.

Then I thought of tritium. Watches with tritium gas-filled tubes glow all night, every night, for a decade or two. Ball is probably the best-known user of tritium, but I wasn’t looking to drop a grand or three on a watch to wear to bed at night. And since tritium does fade, it seems like something you don’t want on an expensive timepiece.

Outside of Ball’s dressy-sport watches, though, tritium mostly appears on watches with military aspirations, and tacticool is definitely not my thing. Eventually I found this traser (sic) P59. The 37mm version on a nylon strap is about as cheap as it gets for a tritium watch that you don’t have to buy on AliExpress. It definitely has a tactical vibe, but it’s not over the top. We’ll get into the watch in a minute; first, allow me a digression on tritium, a most violent isotope.

Hellfire Hydrogen

Humans are overachievers. Even before the first nuclear bomb exploded, clever primates were thinking about making something far more powerful. Fission only gets you so far, it turns out; if you really want to make a bang, fusion is the way to go. And tritium, which is just hydrogen with two extra neutrons, makes great fusion fuel. In our semi-post-cold war world, some people seem a little fuzzy on what an “H bomb” is, and how it might differ from a plain old nuclear bomb. Let’s hope it stays that way, because if you have to think seriously about the distinction, things are grim indeed.

Back when radioactivity was the exciting future, we figured out that if you mix radium, which has a half-life of 1,600 years and blasts out ionizing gamma radiation as it decays, with a phosphorescent compound, you could make glowing paint. What fun! People put it on watches and clocks, on their faces and lips and finger nails. I won’t rehash the story of the radium girls here, but many of them paid for this panacea of light with their teeth and tongues and lives. Radium was so hot that it quickly cooked off the phosphorescent component of the paint, leaving us with the dead but now-desirable yellow-beige pigment that is recreated on vintage-inspired watches with modern, safe, boring lume. I should not say boring, because if you dig into how non-radioactive lume works, it’s pretty cool. But it’s not as cool as something hot — Imagine Dragons never wrote a song about it.

Tritium, in addition to fueling world-ending bombs, makes things glow without the cancerous downsides of radium. It’s radioactive, but in a gentle way, emitting beta particles as it breaks down, which as I understand it, are just electrons. The tritium decay betas fizzle out after trying to fly through a few millimeters of air, and human skin is like kevlar against them.

In the 90s someone figured out how to make hot lume safe: tritium in a jar. A tiny borosilicate glass tube, to be exact, full of tritium gas, and painted on the inside with a radiophosphor. As the beta particles zing out of the decaying tritium, they energize the phosphor, and voila: a soft, steady glow. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years, and doesn’t fry the phosphors as quickly, so you can expect a good decade or more of glow (some watch brands even claim 25 years, and they’re all using the same tubes). That’s more than you get out of radium paint, and a lot more than was possible from the safer-but-less-effective successor to radium, promethium, with a half-life of just 2.6 years.

Besides watches aimed at the military and military cosplayers, these tritium vials find their way into gunsights, to make shooting people in the dark easier. For some reason this rare hydrogen isotope often bends towards death.

But beta particles are not just about serving the violent whims of man. Check this out:

I recorded this at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. It’s what’s called a “cloud chamber,” which is a simple arrangement involving evaporated alcohol above a refrigerated surface: you can make one from stuff you pick up at the supermarket, if you live around supermarkets that sell dry ice. What we see here are the passage of charged particles, mostly arriving from space (more romantically termed “cosmic rays”). The fat tracks that look like Hollywood lines of coke are from high-energy gamma particles slamming through the gaseous alcohol. The squiggly, spindly tracks are beta particles, deflected from a straight line by impacts with molecules. Not all beta particles are created equal, apparently: these extraterrestrial bad boys come screaming through the atmosphere and the museum walls, dire wolves compared to the chihuahuas trapped in my borosilicate tubes. I can tell you it was hard to pull myself away from this thing.

The Night’s Watch

Normally I put a premium on horological provenance: I value a good watch story, and I’m put off by pretenders that, say, resurrect a defunct name and claim “since 1893” or something. traser lacks any such pretensions: it’s just a name dreamed up by mb-microtec ag (which clearly has a real beef with capital letters), the Swiss company that supplies tritium tubes to most of the watch industry, as well as arms makers. The tubes are branded as “trigalight,” which sounds more gunny than watchy. So traser exists to sell trigalight. If you want to bring your own trigalight-blinged watch to market, mb-microtec is also happy to help you produce it. They’re not precious; they just want to move that tritium. Capitalists who hate capital letters.

I initially assumed that mb-microtec used white-label watchmakers in Switzerland, but no, they make the watches themselves at their facility in Niederwangen. I asked, and got an answer in less than a day! So trasers are “Swiss Made,” and not in a generic sense. Which I like. A bit of authenticity after all.

The 37mm P59 Essential S on a NATO strap is the cheapest traser you can buy. You get a steel case, sapphire crystal, 10 bar water resistance. I paid 200 EUR for mine; you can get the P59 on a leather or Milanese strap for a bit more, which is probably worth it for most people because the Nato feels like disposable packaging. It also adds a couple of millimeters of height on the wrist that this watch desperately does not need. But for sleeping, it’s fine.

The least inspiring spec is the ultra-basic ETA 804.112 quartz movement: “Swiss Made” as it has to be for the watch to qualify as the same, but plastic, un-jeweled, and spot-welded into unrepairability. The second hand alignment on my example isn’t terrible, but it’s hardly perfect and varies a bit. The minute hand also has an odd habit of slipping a little after setting the watch, even when I “back into” the time as one is supposed to. The accuracy of this bog-standard movement has none-the-less been impressive; it’s certainly not thermo-compensated, but by luck it hasn’t drifted by even one second in the few months I’ve been wearing the watch.

The specs overall are not bad for the price point; you’ll find disposable quartz movements like this one in watches that sell for a lot more. But what about the design? Well, the watch looks like it was put together by a company mainly interested in selling something else. The proportions are a bit wonky: the watch is oddly thick for its size, presumably to accommodate the towering hand stack, itself a glaring tell-tale of a watch that’s been assembled from off-the-shelf parts. You could fly a jetliner through the gap between the second and minute hands: even taking into account the thickness that the tritium tube adds to the minute hand, there is a lot of room there. The dial seems to lie at the bottom of a well that your peer down into through the flat crystal.

That dial is simple, matte black with lumed numbers, hour markers, and a chapter ring that looks nice when it’s not obscured by the walls of the case. My variant of the P59 has black hands (glossy, enamel-like paint) that don’t exactly stand out against the black dial, but the tubes on the hands keep the watch readable. The larger arabics at 12, 6 and 9 (a tiny date window replaces the 3) give the dial a drop of personality. At least it’s not another Dirty Dozen homage.

The lume works fine as paint, but as lume, it’s garbage. It shines bright for a few minutes, but within an hour it’s gone dark. It’s allegedly Super-LumiNova, but apart from surely being standard grade, I wonder if it’s been watered down with something else.

The case is steel — PVDed black on my version, but also available as bare metal. I normally avoid PVD coatings because I’m afraid they’ll scratch, but since my sheets are really soft I figured that wouldn’t be a problem here. The PVD means there’s no finishing to comment on; it’s all just… black. There are crown guards protecting an unsigned (*cough* catalog part) crown.

Speaking of finishing, PVD can’t hide everything. Under a loupe, you’ll see the watch’s cheapness in the rough edges of the hands, with the black paint not being thick enough to conceal the marks. The pin cap is also off-center on mine. The round date window is a little distorted, and the date does not always line up perfectly, though it’s so small that I can barely read it anyway.

Look, design-wise, this watch doesn’t completely come together, and the level of finishing is about what you’d expect for something “Swiss Made” at this price; if you’re paying Swiss watchmakers to put something together, with health insurance and their own parking spaces and everything, there’s not going to be much left for polishing the hands.

But who really cares? Because the headline feature of this watch is the frickin’ nuclear-powered lighting, and it glows just fine. You get a long tube on the minute hand, a shorter one on the hour, and indices at 12, 3, 6, and 9. The 12 o’clock marker is orange, which gets you oriented — the rest glow light green. The are also two tiny “hair lights” around the traser branding, an unnecessary but nifty flourish (these are set into cutouts in the dial, which suggest that at least that part is made specifically for this watch and not picked from a catalog).

Compared to good fully-charged lume, the trigalights are tame; while sunlight-charged lume fairly thrums with luminance if you, say, peer at the watch under the shadow of your hand, the tritium glow is dim enough to be invisible unless you’re in really low ambient light. But conventional lume dumps most of its photons within a few minutes, even if it manages to glow dimly for hours more. Very quickly, the trigalights surpass even good luminous paint and if you look at the watch in darkness with adjusted eyes, it practically sings out the time.

Against the Dying of the Light

I was curious about how the discharge curve of conventional lume compares to the steady glow of decaying tritium so I gave both the P59 and my Casio Oceanus S100 a good blast of LED light and then took some photos in the dark. I held the exposure constant for the first two shots and then dropped it by a stop for the second two, to better suggest the experience of seeing the lume in the dark. Behold.

At this point, I went and watched an episode of Satoshi Kon’s bizarrely compelling animated series Paranoia Agent. L’il Slugger walloped the copycat.

Raaiiyaa    ra    ra i yo ra    a magnificent mushroom cloud in the sky…

Then I took one more picture.

So, even though the conventional lume is hella bright off the line, it quickly fades to parity with tritium, and drops lower in less than half an hour. The Casio S100’s lume remains technically visible in a black room even after six or seven hours to newly opened eyes, but my vision is so bleary at that point that I can’t distinguish the double-index at 12 o’clock from the rest, so I sometimes find myself misreading the time by an hour. The orange index of the P59 solves this problem, and the tritium looks positively brilliant in the darkest hour of the soul.

Conclusion

If you want a legit Swiss watch with tritium lume on the cheap, you won’t get much cheaper than this. A Swiss Luminox will run you a lot more. Ditto a plastic Marathon, never mind a steel version. Ditto ProTek, which apparently makes an “official” US Marine Corps watch but is very coy about where they’re actually produced, so I don’t think it’s Camp Pendleton. If you like to live dangerously, I suppose you could try your luck with one of the various off-brand Chinese watches on AliExpress — they seem to use the same tritium tubes, but everything else about them is a crapshoot. They tend to be more visually adventurous than the P59, but not necessarily in a good way.

If you want a watch that’s stylistically compelling, or graceful, or with an engrossing horological provenance, the P59 isn’t it. But if you’re committed to tritium, you’re already fishing in a pretty shallow pond anyway.

There’s also an “M” variant of the P59, with a wider case. I suspect it would address some of my problems with proportionality (it’s 42mm wide, but the same thickness as the “S”). It costs a bit more, but I think it would be worth it for anyone who actually wants to wear the watch out in the world.

But as an in-the-dark-time-telling tool, the P59 S fulfils its mission. For me, it falls short as a fetish object, but I guess I’m OK with that. I have other watches to fetishize, even if I don’t take them to bed.

The spirit may be willing, but the flesh is indeed weak. I sold my Panasonic S1 after a year. Egads, you shriek, you seemed so excited, so fulfilled, what happened?!? Well, in the end, gravity won. Gravity always wins. I stand by the general thesis I put forward in my S1 review, namely that a little discomfort should not dissuade one from carrying the camera one wants to carry. But when the shiny newness comes off, a kilo and a half of camera on the shoulder does have a way of encouraging the consideration of options. I would have persevered if there were no other way, but what if I could have that beautiful EVF for half the weight? Yes, please. 

Lose Weight Now with Fuji!

When I got the S1, there was nothing else even close to it in price that offered a 5 megadot EVF. But right around the time I was shopping for a used S1, Fuji introduced the X-H2. Back then it went for more than twice what I paid for the S1, but praise depreciation, not anymore. It’s not the screaming deal that the S1 presented a year ago, but it’s more palatable than when it was only available new at retail. Plus, once I sold all my L mount stuff, I actually got back more than I spent on the X-H2 and the lens I wanted, so it’s like I made money by buying another camera! My justification-fu is strong.

Why jump to Fuji? If you want to downsize while keeping a 5 megadot EVF, you really only have two options. There’s the OMDS OM-1, but while I know and love Olympus cameras, I wanted to keep the sensor a bit bigger than Micro Fourth Thirds. That means APS-C, and if you’re a gear-head, that means Fuji. Like its Fuji APS-C X-series brethren, and unlike anything from the competition, the X-H2 is an unapologetically serious camera. Outside of MFT, the other camera makers have prostrated themselves before the unholy alter of the “full frame.” The big three, for example, all offer APS-C versions of their mirrorless mount cameras, but it’s obvious that they exist only to lure in normies thinking of improving on their phones. They are not positioned as serious alternatives to the full frame bodies; they aren’t aimed at enthusiast photographers who might just want something smaller and lighter. To call the APS-C-specific mirrorless lens lineups from Canon and Nikon perfunctory would be charitable. Sony is better only because the E mount actually started as APS-C-only, back when full-frame mirrorless was a dream nobody was having yet, so for a while had Sony’s full attention, plus a bunch of third-party development. All of the recent APS-C bodies from the big three seem meekly committed to not cannibalizing sales of more expensive (and almost certainly higher margin) full frame options.  

Indeed, Fuji goes its own way. The X-T cameras have a control layout that flies in the face of the multi-function dials that have long been standard on digital bodies. The X-Pro cameras go a step further with a hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder that’s wholly unlike anything from other makers. Normcore dad that I am, went with an X-H camera: vanilla design with a PASM dial (cleverly, actually a PSAM dial), a pair of multi-function wheels, a brace of programable buttons. But it’s still unlike anything from the big three: a top-spec EVF in a relatively affordable, relatively compact body, with a full menu of lenses designed to take advantage of the smaller sensor — in some cases, barely bigger than roughly equivalent MFT glass. 

Fuji also has a fun fandom around it. Consider if you will Fujilove “magazine,” an electronic publication that charges a princely ten bucks a month for access. In the interests of journalism I ponied up to see what it was all about — and I liked it! The featured photography is sometimes quite good, much better than random web stuff. Ditto the writing. And your ten spot also lets you download all the back issues, so It’s actually a pretty good deal. 

A (Smaller) Room with a View

The X-H2 has been extensively reviewed so I’m not going to rewrite the wheel. Instead I’ll focus on my personal obsession, the viewfinder, which gets short shrift from reviewers and is almost never considered in the context of the wider market.

The best EVFs on an APS-C body from any of the big three still use the 2.4 megadot panels that were state of the art eight years ago. But oh ho, Fuji’s APS-C X-H2 has a 5.76 megadot panel behind beefy .80 x mag finder optics, in all likelihood better than the 3.69 megadot panel in the $8,000 full-frame Nikon Z8.  Regular readers will know how I fetishize EVF performance, and won’t be surprised that the X-H2 caught my eye (so to speak) as soon as I got tired of lugging the S1. 

So how do the viewfinders of the Panasonic S1 and the Fuji X-H2 compare? The short answer: the Fuji’s is a bit better. While the panel resolutions are equivalent, one thing you quickly figure out if you embark on the tortured road of EVF connoisseurship is that the panel is only part of a system with a lot of inputs, hardly any of which get discussed in most reviews (rarely for the model under review, and even less in comparison to other models). For example, a dirty secret is that the physical panel resolution spec is not always indicative of the actual resolution of the preview image. In side by-side comparison, it became clear to me that even when both cameras were optimally configured for detail, the Fuji was pushing a little more information to the panel than the Panasonic. The difference was subtle, most visible in something like text, but it was there.   

Both cameras also cut resolution dramatically when engaging the higher frame rate options on the EVFs — the Fuji implies this will happen by the way the options are named, but the Panasonic menu options treat frame rate like a choice without consequences.

Apart from detail levels, I found little to distinguish the viewfinder image quality. The slight magnification advantage of the Fuji (.80 vs .78 for the Panasonic) was hard for me to detect even when moving my eye from one finder to the other, much less in isolation. The accepted gospel is that bigger is better with viewfinders, but I feel that both EVFs are already pushing right up against  practical limits of how big a viewfinder can be without interfering with composition. When I look at the center of the VF, I want to be more or less aware of what’s happening towards the edges so I can compose without roving my eye around the frame. I can still do that with the Fuji, but only just. At any higher magnification, I would probably resort to using a display mode that leaves a border around the image.

Magnification is largely a function of optics (I think all of these 5 megadot panels are the same size, if not actually the same part) and I wondered if I’d see differences there. With the S1’s massive size, I was worried that Panasonic had managed better corrected optics than the Fuji’s flattened “prism hump” would allow. But I could not really see a difference. Both are sharp right to the edge of the image, and don’t force the user to refocus their eye to see into the corners. Both offer good enough eye relief (I don’t wear glasses — yet). In both I detected an almost subliminal barrel distortion but it only showed up if I looked for it. It could have been in the lens, or some miscorrection the camera was doing to the lens image, or the optics. It was nothing I’d worry about. 

Nobody quotes brightness or contrast specs for EVFs, but I did not notice a difference. The S1 has a really nice eye cup to keep extraneous light out of the way, but I have not had many problems with the Fuji in the few bright light situations I’ve shot it (it being winter in France as I write this). Contrast ratios also seem similar, though I don’t have a way to empirically test it. Both are OLED panels, which by definition offer nice deep blacks (and again, they might be the same panel — maybe the one Sony announced in 2018, but I’m just guessing). 

Although the S1 is my main point of reference, I did have a chance to compare the X-H2 EVF side-by-side with a Sony A7 IV. As of this writing it’s the latest offering in Sony’s mainstream full-frame lineup, and although it’s a bit long in the tooth, it still runs about $600 more than the X-H2 at B&H. But like most of the current crop of high-end cameras, it has a 3.68 megadot EVF. This is a smaller number than 5.76, but since you have to think of resolution as width and height multiplied together, the linear specs encourage an overestimation of the difference. And maybe this is why so much of the market is content to sit at 3.68 megadots. But looking through the A7 IV’s EVF, I was surprised to see significantly less detail in the image. I have to believe that, just as the S1 doesn’t seem to take full advantage of its high-res panel, the Sony is also starving its EVF display. Processing limitations, power consumption considerations? I don’t know. The Sony also seemed to cut corners on EVF optics: I had to refocus my eye a bit to get sharp in the corners, and there was some subtle pincushion distortion.  

Two niggles have emerged during my use of the X-H2’s EVF so far. First, I almost immediately noticed that with AF-C engaged it flickers like crazy when used under the lighting in my living room, which is where I take a disproportionate number of photos of my beautiful family. As it happens, we just redid the whole room and I picked out most of the bulbs, and because I care I tried to stick to Philips as much as possible. So these aren’t weird off-brand bulbs that you might buy in a convenience store. Plus, none of my other cameras take exception with them. I tried messing with the anti-flicker settings even though I think those only apply to video capture, but in any case it didn’t help. 

Second, a few times I’ve pulled the camera quickly to my eye and had to wait for the EVF to kick on. When it happened I imagined that it was my whip-quick Cartier-Bresson-like street photography style that was the cause, but in fact when I consciously try to out-speed the eye sensor, I can’t — it switches from screen to EVF essentially instantly. Someone suggested to me that in bright light the eye sensor might have trouble, but I have not noticed a correlation between ambient light levels and this glitch. If you’re reading this and have ideas, feel free to share. 

Who Cares?

If you’re read this far, you apparently have the same unhealthy obsession with viewfinders that I do. It may be worth stepping back to ask if any of this matters. EVF technology has long surpassed the essential needs of the photographer; all it really has to do is provide enough of a preview to allow for effective composition. A secondary benefit unique to digital capture is that the preview can help judge proper exposure; this was never even on the menu with optical finders, but we expect it in the world of EVFs.

Any mid-range or better camera of the last several years meets these basic criteria. So why get sweaty about this or that OLED panel? For me, it’s not just a question of aesthetic pleasure (though it is that). As a photographer, you already make a substantial sacrifice each time you put a camera in front of your face. You trade, however briefly, the experience of seeing now for the promise of seeing later. You make it possible to revisit a scene, for yourself and others, but at the price of not quite being there as it happens. No viewfinder, no matter how “good,” can change the fundamental economics of that transaction. But a nice EVF does give you a better view of what you’re missing, and that’s not nothing.

I’ve been served up quite a few clickbait stories along the lines of “Will AI Kill Photography?” and I have given them exactly as much attention as they deserve. But then I encountered an op-ed in no less than the New York Times with the title, “A.I. Is the Future of Photography. Does That Mean Photography Is Dead?” and I could no longer stay silent.

No. AI will unleash a shitshow of disruption, but it will not “kill photography” unless it does so incidentally, by killing everything, period. The photo-realistic images that come out of today’s AI image generators will certainly look more photo-realistic tomorrow, but even when their products are indistinguishable from actual photographs, they will not be photographs. The only photographs they will literally replace are certain commercial images, in the way that CGI makes Ikea’s product photos not-photos.

What these articles are generally missing is a useful metaphor that captures the relationship between AI-generated images and photography, because that would immediately undermine the premise of the headline. So behold.

Imagine that with the advent of writing, people used it solely to record their versions of things that actually happened or were “true.” In the heyday of Barnes & Noble, you would find nothing but memoirs, histories, biographies, science, self-help, yellow Dummies books and text books. Nothing would be labelled “non-fiction” because that’s all there is. In this alternate reality, as in ours, people would understand that every written word was filtered through a human mind; that even the most aspirationally objective journalism has a point of view, that a memoir is made of memories that are as malleable as our own perceptions. But still, in this upside down, the goal of writing would be purely the conveyance of some nominally objective reality.

Then imagine that in 2022, someone said, “Hey, what if we used words to record stories that never happened?” Suddenly you have unicorns talking to aliens, Germany winning the war, kids jumping through walls onto trains to magic academies.

Now, this would be a big deal, a whole new way to use written language. Apart from having a ton of fun, we would be able explore new truths in new ways. How goddamn exciting! 

Some curmudgeons might think this new thing was a mere frivolity. But you know what no one would think? That fiction would “kill” history books, or journalism, or memoirs, or biographies. Fiction and nonfiction might both be writing, but they’re not in competition. They’re not for the same things, even if there’s some overlap. Only someone who can’t read is likely to mistake one for the other.  

This is the critical difference between a photograph and an AI-generated photo-realistic image: the photograph is generally supposed to be of a scene that existed in the world. Now, not since the first week of photography’s existence has anyone been naive enough to believe that a photograph is some impartial record of reality since there are countless elements that intervene: that pesky translation from three dimensions to two, the fingerprints of the technologies used to take the photo and later present it, the myriad decisions the photographer made (or didn’t) about configuring and pointing the camera, what was included in and excluded from the frame… you could fill volumes with the ways photographs are not reality, but their stubbornly indexical nature, even when created with a smartphone and all its image “optimization,” is not really debatable. Yes, they can be manipulated, made to lie, but they have an essential truthfulness that people, lying liars that we are, have to actively undermine. 

AI image generation runs that pipeline in reverse: you certainly could use it to illustrate something that really happened, but it would be pushing against the nature of the medium, which conjures photo-ish images through means that are opaque, not only to the person writing the “prompt,” but also to the system’s creators. The complete rupture of the indexical link makes AI imagery a fundamentally different thing from what has been understood as photography for the last couple centuries, and the difference seems so astoundingly obvious to me that I’m surprised, despite my cynicism, that we’re having this conversation at all. 

The vat-grown images that AI produces are not photographs. The fact that they can be mistaken for photographs is significant since bad actors will leverage that ambiguity to nefarious ends. This may further undermine public trust in images as usefully indexical records of things that happened, but it won’t decrease our appetite for legitimate photographs that show us the world; it will just put a premium on trusted curators among discerning consumers of information, and make the less discerning easier to dupe than they already are (but honestly, how much can that bar be lowered?)

The fiction/non-fiction metaphor is useful, but it does break down eventually. A good fiction writer can create an entirely credible but entirely fictitious memoir. A desperate journalist can make up stories a lot faster than actually reporting them out. If the chips fall their way, no one is ever the wiser. It happens! That doesn’t diminish the appeal of good journalism or honest memoirs. But even though we may drag the poor writer who mislabels their creative output, it has infinitely more value than a fake AI photo, which is at best an illustration, and at worst an empty simulacrum of a fantasy no one had. 

That hasn’t stopped artists from trying to use this new tool to some interesting effect. The effect, in my experience so far, has been underwhelming. I don’t want to throw specific shade on the artists quoted in the NYTime piece I cited, but I went to Paris Photo last year and stumbled blearily through the “secteur digital,” a ghetto that the show organizers apparently felt compelled to offer so they wouldn’t seem out of touch with a potentially, but not actually, important artistic trend. My admittedly brief glance was not rewarding. I would listen to anyone with a coherent counterargument, but I would not listen to someone who argued that that stuff was photography, or that it was going to kill anything but some time.

Let me be clear that I’m not shorting AI in general. It’ll be big. We’ve already got two wheels across the center line and while we bicker about gender pronouns the car is lazily drifting further over. If we had AI in this jalopy it might alert us to the fact, but the basic machine of human culture remains firmly rooted in hunter gathering and doesn’t even have anti-lock brakes, much less lane guidance. The oncoming AI truck will make a hell of a bang when we hit it, and yes, I think we’ll see some killing. But photography is safe, as long as we retain our humanity. 

a photograph in the style of stephen shore

a photograph in the style of dorothea lange

a photograph in the style of bruce gilden

a photograph in the style of gregory crewdson

a photograph in the style of robert frank

a photograph in the style of matthew barney

a photograph in the style of Joel Meyerowitz

a photograph in the style of diane arbus

Is Casio the least sexy watch company in the world? It’s a rhetorical question, of course. You don’t get weaponized in a Shakira diss track by accident. Casio makes calculator watches and straight-up calculators. The company’s actual name is Casio Computer Co., Ltd. Computer. Get thee behind me, Satan.

And yet. Who’s cooler than Satan? Again, rhetorical.  

Born from Ashes

While Seiko and Citizen, the other two big Japanese watchmakers, trace their horological roots back to ye olden mechanical tymes, Casio has a different origin story. In 1946, Tadao Kashio founded a company that made a roach clip you could wear like a ring. It was actually his brother’s idea, but the company that would come to be called Casio (Kashio, Casio, get it?) was and is a family business — the current CEO is Tadao’s nephew. 

A TB infection had spared Tadao from the Emperor’s army (reportedly to his shame) so as Japan got down to the bloody business of building its Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere he instead set up a lathe in his backyard and made aircraft parts. That backyard happened to be in Tokyo, and General LeMay’s fearsomely efficient fire bombing eventually put an end to his grassroots patriotism, the Sphere, and most of Japan’s major population centers. But that was the past in 1946. In the present, with the heart note of napalm still in the air, tobacco was in high demand and short supply, and rebuilding from scratch was busy work. With the Casio roach clip you could smoke that butt to ash while keeping your hands free for reconstruction/survival. Roach clip money funded Casio’s lateral move into electronic calculating machines, which grew into a prowess with integrated circuits that eventually made the production of quartz watches a no-brainer. 

The quartz crisis is usually framed as a story of legacy watchmakers that adapted or didn’t, but it’s interesting that quartz came from within the established watch industry. A consortium of Swiss companies were scrambling to develop a viable quartz movement, but Seiko, the most ambitious of the Japanese watchmakers, beat them to market. All of these players seem to have seen quartz as a route to superlative timekeeping and expected to charge a fat-margin premium for it. Seiko’s Astron, the first commercially-available quartz watch, cost 450,000 Japanese yen in 1969, or about $12,000 when adjusted for inflation. It’s common to say that it cost “as much as a compact car,” but it’s more interesting to compare it to a Rolex Submariner, which apparently went for around $175 at the same time: that’s just $1,500 with inflation. I guess watches were cheaper back then. Now the world is full of watches that cost as much as a small plane, and a few that cost as much as a big one. Quartz watches don’t generally command plane money, but an F.P. Journe Elegante will still set you back fifty grand, which will also buy a nice foreclosed three bed/two bathroom home in Ohio. 

What’s never been clear to me is if everyone or anyone at the time saw where the quartz road led. Watch people today tend to view the quartz crisis as a dark age that descended on watchmaking, wiping out a century of fine mechanical artistry in favor of cheap disposable tat. It’s hard to imagine that the companies charging so eagerly into the breach had that destination in mind. Was it obvious that solid-state technology scales in a way that makes that inevitable? Maybe only in retrospect. I can’t believe the Swiss saw that as the endgame, or they would have locked their electrical engineers away in the country’s warren of underground bunkers. But it was only the dawn of the silicon age, and the hard light of high noon was yet to shine. 

Anyway, Casio’s watch business was born in the maelstrom of the quartz crisis. The company pivoted, not from mechanical watches, but from calculators. This might explain why it’s not quite like any other watchmaker. Five years after Seiko’s Astron, Casio launched its first watch, the Casiotron. It went for a lot less than the Astron, though it was still expensive for the time, around $1,000 adjusted for inflation. But the economics of silicon meant prices kept falling. I haven’t managed to track down the moment when quartz flipped from premium to cheap-as-chips, but by 1978 the Casio F-100C, a pretty basic LCD quartz watch, went for $39.95, less than $200 inflation adjusted, and just two years later the similarly-spec-ed F-7 retailed for $19.95, under $75 today. At that point, you probably felt kind of silly if you’d bought a Casiotron six years earlier. 

By 1989 Casio was able to introduce the F-91W, a watch that remains in production today and is probably the best-selling timepiece of all time. You can get one right now for fifteen bucks. It’s the democratic promise of quartz in its purest form: a watch that’s dirt cheap, keeps accurate time for years without fuss, and is hard to kill. Its durable, no-bullshit essence has made it a favorite of terrorists and presidents and countless millions of people all around the globe who just want to know what time it is. 

Big in Japan

Casio’s great success is its G-Shock line, playfully ugly and indestructible watches that lean into their quartz-ness with lots of LCD action and crazy features. You can buy a G-Shock for less than 50 bucks if you just want to play hockey with your watch as the puck, while the top-end limited edition models now command prices north of $8,000.

But I’m more of an analog guy, so today we’ll consider the Casio Oceanus S100, a simple three-hander introduced over a decade ago. Impressively it’s still a current model, though I doubt it will have a run as long as the F-91W. It’s way more expensive than that watch, but not really any sexier. And yet it has its charms, and possesses a kind of practical romance that appeals to me.

The Oceanus line today is mostly Japan-only, though it was exported for a while years ago. I guess the idea of a premium, sporty, tough but also dressy watch with diver influences didn’t catch on abroad.  

The S100 is the smallest of the current lot, 40mm across ex-crown, and all it does is tell you when now is, which is my thing. Its specs are hardly unusual: radio synchronization, solar charging, perpetual calendar. This was all bleeding edge at the end of the 20th century, but now it's bog-standard stuff that you can find in plenty of watches retailing for under a hunge from any of the big Japanese manufactures. But this review posits that maybe, in this era of ubiquitous internet and mechanical watch fetishism, maybe we have become blind to the essential romance of something like the S100.

What Is this Thing?

I suspect that when Casio made the S100, the target buyer was a Japanese businessman who wanted a nice, accurate watch that he wouldn’t have to fuss with, that suggested the possibility of adventure the way a Lexus SUV invites a fantasy of driving off road, and that looked like quality while not running the risk of being fancier than his boss’s watch. I suspect that the men who bought it for those reasons were not disappointed.

But the S100 also appears to have found a niche farther afield, as a no-maintenance beater for watch enthusiasts who sometimes want a break from the delicate exigencies of their mechanical timepieces. This is the sense I get from the fairly numerous English-language user reports that have popped up over the last decade. The S100 has just enough to make it interesting for a watch snob: it’s built to an unusually high standard for its price by a company that’s often overlooked in horological circles. The fact that it keeps perfect time for years and years with no intervention also makes it appealing to people who want to be able to slap it on after long periods of neglect, and stands in sharp contrast to the Tamagotchi demands of mechanical watches.    

Style-wise, the S100 is a mongrel. Imagine a Grand Seiko had a baby with a diver that had cross-over field watch ambitions and you might picture something like the S100. The beveled, high-polish applied indices would suggest the boardroom if they weren’t bright blue on four sides and topped with lume. Further offsetting the dressiness are crown guards, balanced by a purely ornamental protrusion on the left side of the case, that imply the watch is meant to deal with physical activity. The Oceanus logo and the “TOUGH MVT” text on the dial are more PTO than CEO. The watch is allegedly watertight to 10 bar, but the lack of a screw-down crown and the big pusher next to it suggest that this is a somewhat theoretical rating. Despite the ocean theme and pressure rating, there’s no rotating bezel: clearly you’re not meant to wear this with a scuba tank. 

Which is fine by me. I wanted a watch that could be dunked with impunity, but I generally don’t put my head underwater on purpose. I’m more concerned about jumping into the pool to save a flailing kid. As far as salt water goes, I’m no Cousteau but I might need to grab someone who’s stumbled into the surf when they were supposed to be skipping rocks. I like the opportunities for fine workmanship that a watch with some ornament affords, but I also like to imagine that I might have adventures out in the world. Guard that crown, baby.

First Impressions

Despite recent baby steps towards a more international presence, the Oceanus line remains largely Japan-only, so if you want a new S100 you’re looking at one of the specialty Japanese exporters or eBay. I bought mine new from an eBay seller, who included an origami crane in the box. At first I thought this was cool, but then I realized that you can probably buy origami cranes in bulk from China, and I felt a little sad. I kept the crane anyway, since it’s the thought that counts, and maybe I was being too cynical. 

When I opened the watch box, I saw the S100’s hands snap from 12:00:00 to the current time in Tokyo. This is one of the S100’s tricks (presumably shared with all of Casio’s solar watches): if kept in the dark for a week, the hands park at 12 and the watch dozes quietly. What dreams flit through the simple matrix of its mind? It can supposedly hibernate in darkness like this without loosing track of time for up to three years. This function appeals to me: it’s like the watch is a flower at night, furling its petals until the dawn, even if that dawn might be years in breaking.  

With the hands having resumed their march, I considered my new watch. I decided I… liked it? I wasn’t sure. Watches, more than most consumer goods, don’t look much like the pictures you see of them when you’re shopping online. Partly it’s a question of magnification, and partly it’s the light — watches are often designed to play tricks with light and static images rarely tell the whole story. This is definitely the case with the S100, which is surprisingly flashy in person. Literally so: it has lots of high-polish facets that catch the light and glint brightly as the watch moves. 

This is most noticeable with the applied indices, which also happen to be an intense blue on four sides, so you get a light show of bright blue flashes as the watch moves. I knew blue was a signature color used throughout the Oceanus line, but I expected something more like heat blued steel. This is not that. The S100’s blue is really electric, I assume some kind of PVD coating. I wasn’t sure how much I liked it.

The blue is in your face, but the potentially busy text on the chapter ring is not. The 29 cities represented by three-letter codes barely make themselves known, thanks to the tiny size of the printing and fact that the chapter ring slants down towards the dial. I like how these codes reference the geographic world, tying the watch to a specific moment in history when those cities not only existed but were significant enough to stand in for a whole time zone. I could decrypt about half of them. Maybe one day I’ll look up the rest, or just let the mystery lie. The other indicators scattered around the dial that allow you to configure various functions (daylight savings, radio functioning) are also more discrete than you might imagine if you’ve been looking at magnified images of the watch on your screen.

Case Logic

The S100 case and its integrated bracelet are made of titanium. Titanium is indelibly linked in my mind with military aviation, especially the swing-wing structure of the Grumman F-14 and damn near the whole of the Lockheed SR-71. The F-14 was the basis for the aircraft in a cartoon I watched as a child with fundamentalist intensity. It was also imaginarily flown by Tom Cruise in the popular film/recruitment tool Top Gun, and when I saw it at as a boy it defined what I thought was cool for quite a while. I worry that Top Gun does not survive adult scrutiny, but the SR-71 Blackbird remains immune to revisionism in my heart, so it’s fun to have a titanium watch.

The case finishing strikes me as very good, though I have to admit I’m not as much a connoisseur of this particular area as I am of dials, which readily reveal their features and faults to any attentive eye (more on the S100’s dial later). You get a mix of fine brushing on most surfaces, set against a high-polish bezel the flows nicely into the domed crystal. The afore mentioned crown guards and left-side protrusion are actually quite complex in form, and also have mirror polish on the top surface. It all creates a muscular display of technical precision.

If you poke around the few English-language forums that discuss Oceanus watches, you’ll likely come across the notion that Oceanus cases are made in the same place as Seiko’s hallowed Grand Seiko cases. I initially assumed this was wishful thinking, but drilling down, it seems more likely than not to be true. Hayashi Seiki Seizo has been making watchcases in Japan since 1921, and the company is nothing if not close to Seiko: when the earthquake that set off the infamous tsunami of 2011 nearly knocked down the Hayashi factory building in Fukushima, employees scrambled into the wreckage to salvage Grand Seiko cases that were in production. Within a few weeks, critical machinery had been extracted from the unstable building and set up again in Seiko’s own Shizukuishi factory. Among that tooling would have been the polishing machines used to create the famous sallaz mirror finish on Grand Seikos, a feature that Casio also touts for the S100, albeit without Seiko’s panache for creating an air of exclusivity. And if you go to the “Watchcase and Precision Parts” section of Hayashi’s utilitarian website, you’ll see an image of their factory floor with a Grand Seiko poster on the wall, and a little further down the page, a close-up of a clearly marked Oceanus case back. (Hayashi also does ion coatings, and I wonder if they’re responsible for the bright blue on this watch.) 

Since we’re talking about factories, I’ll mention that the S100 is made on a special line in Casio’s Yamagata factory dedicated to Oceanus watches and the highest-end G-Shock models. There are videos of it online: workers kitted out in white clean suits operating very fancy looking equipment, with lots of extremely close-up views of watches on video monitors. In general you have to pay a lot for a watch before you can say with any certainty who really designed it, where its parts come from, and who assembled them into a working timepiece. The S100 offers an unusual amount of transparency for its price.

Crown Click

You might have thought that because this was a quartz watch you would be spared my usual rumination on knob feel. Silly rabbit! Let’s start with the crown, which is the main attraction. Turning it in the pushed-in position (as you would normally wind a mechanical watch) does nothing, but I’m a completist so we’ll start there. Oddly, considering there’s no point in doing it, turning the crown here is quite satisfying. You don’t get the meaty resistance of keyless works tensioning a mainspring, but the movement is nicely damped. 

Pulling out the crown one click feels fine — it’s neither too hard nor too easy. Then the real fun starts. When the crown pops out the seconds hand snaps to point towards the current time zone, indicated by three letter codes printed on the chapter ring (don’t worry, the watch is still keeping time). Turning the crown in either direction advances the pointer around the dial, with distinct clicks. The force required to turn the crown, while never excessive, rises as you approach the click point, then suddenly drops as you turn through the click. There’s more dynamism than, say, changing the date on an ETA 2824 (pleasant in its own way). It’s a very satisfying feeling, and not something I expected to find on a quartz watch. 

Changing timezones causes the hour hand to swing delightfully to the new time in a way that feels very alien if you’re accustomed to mechanical watches, which generally advance their hands in a staid and utterly predictable manner. Click forward through time zones and the hour hand sprints smartly ahead. Click backwards and the hour hand reverses, a little slower though still spritely. Endearingly, it overshoots the target hour and then advances to the precise position, presumably some kind of alignment check. 

Speaking of alignment, like all of Casio’s “Tough Movement” analog watches, the S100 checks the position of its hands once per hour to make sure they’re where they’re supposed to be. It does this by shining a light through tiny 300-micron-diameter holes in three gears driving the hour, minute and second hand. At the appointed moment (five minutes to the hour) all three holes should line up and the light can shine all the way through. If it doesn’t, the watch knows there’s a problem and gets to fixing it. 

Casio marketing suggests this is to ensure proper hand alignment if some violent shock knocks things out of whack, but I think that might just be a way to make hay out of a technical feature that’s otherwise boring: namely, a system that lets the watch sense hand position so it can match the displayed time with its internal clock. It seems to me that an impact hard enough to make a gear slip would be more likely to knock a hand out of true on its stem, and this system wouldn’t address that (since what it really knows is the position of the underlying wheel, not where the hand is). But anyway, I like the idea of a light shining through tiny holes inside my watch.   

Dialing Down

My unease about the S100’s looks faded with familiarity, and I came to enjoy the blue sparkle of the indices and the chapter ring trim. You can see the pizza-slice seams between the six solar cells that are hidden below the semi-translucent dial; I think the actual dial surface is smooth, but the texture of the solar cells comes through visually and gives the dial a matte, understated look.

I cannot deny the appeal of the seconds hand, which hits its marks all the way around: any doubt could as easily be parallax error as misalignment. People accustomed to the sweeping second hand of mechanical movements might not realize that a shocking number of quartz watches have second hands that never actually point at the second marks. Some are consistently offset by a given amount, while others hit their marks for one section of the dial but miss on another. I’ve even read claims from watch makers that misaligned second hands are either an engineering necessity (Timex) or badges of handmade honor (Vaer). I think it just costs a little more to do it right, and watchmakers know from experience that most quartz buyers don’t care enough to justify the production expense. But I care. The Oceanus line, like Grand Seiko, has a good reputation for honoring the second marks, and my example does not disappoint me. 

So in the world of normal people there’s nothing to complain about, but eventually I had to take a loupe out for some unreasonably close inspection. The tiny print of the city codes is amazingly precise. The indices are clean and perfectly aligned. The dial surface itself is not particularly exciting but I like how the Oceanus logo and other print seem to float in full sun, since they’re printed on the surface of the fairly thick dial substrate and cast shadows on the solar cells deeper down. 

The hands are just slightly beveled, with central trenches filled with lume. They look good from above, with a precise mirror polish, but their side edges are rough-looking from some angles under the loupe. 

The most disappointing element by far is the date window, which is roughly punched through the thick translucent dial. There’s a blue frame stuck around the hole in an apparent effort to conceal this rude finishing: at least it’s centered, but since the frame is a bit bigger than the hole, the sloppy edge remains visible. It would probably have been better to overlap the hole edge with the frame, but maybe that would have made positioning tricky or required an overly-thick frame.

On the plus side, the window is well-placed, substituting for a 3 o’clock index, and the date display itself is well-proportioned relative to the rest of the dial.

Accuracy

People don’t talk much about quartz accuracy, I suppose because the assumption is that it’s always good enough. Casio rates the S100 for +/-15 seconds per month, which is fairly standard and at the same time as good it gets with a conventional quartz movement. If you go to thermocompensated quartz designs you can do +/-10 second a year or better, but the market is surprisingly (to me, anyway) disinterested in this. Quartz Grand Seikos just happen to be super-accurate in their general pursuit of perfection. When it comes to watches marketed explicitly on accuracy, you have your Certinas, that one Longines and the insane Citizen 0100 line. There are a smattering of models from other brands that use high-accuracy ETA Precidrive movements, but good luck ferreting them out. True high accuracy quartz watches are a tiny sliver of the quartz pie. 

Of course the whole point of the radio-synchronized S100 is that even at the edge of its pedestrian accuracy spec, it should never be more than a second off if you’re in range of one of the six time transmitters it can pick up. Each transmitter is linked to a member of the loose network of atomic clocks that defines precise time for all of humanity. Starting around midnight, the S100, like any of Casio’s 6-Band Waveceptor models (there are many), will listen for a transmitter that’s relevant for its current timezone. At midnight, the sun is on the opposite side of the planet, and the deafening roar of its radiation crashing against the ionosphere is as faint as it will get. This makes it easier for the watch to hear the distant low frequency time signal as it flows across the ground, bending over mountain tops. The watch stills its second hand, quieting any interference the tiny motor might generate. The time signal is simply coded, amplitude cranking up and down to send one bit per second, with the whole time and date relayed over the course of a minute. There’s a lot of redundancy built in so the watch can piece together the time over several minutes if reception is choppy. And so once a day the watch is almost perfectly synced to time on Earth.

Some watch people think this is cheating, but I find beauty in the process. Frequent synchronising of timepieces was once part and parcel of owning them — the bonging of tower bells, the BBC’s time pips. Dava Sobel’s stone-cold classic “Longitude” describes (among many other things) the cottage industry that once existed around relaying the time from London’s Greenwich Observatory, with individual time sellers synching their chronometer at the Observatory and then carrying the time to their customers.

Anyway, in my casual testing the radio synch technology worked well: in Los Angeles the S100 grabs the signal from the thunderous WWVB in Fort Collins without much effort, and in Paris it can hear the much closer DCF77 signal from Mainflingen nearly anywhere in my apartment. I’ll hazard that if you’re reading this and have an S100, it will sync in most of the places in the northern hemisphere that you find yourself. 

OK, my NIST digression has exceeded the capacity of an image caption. Recommended Practices also turned me on to a phone number, +1 303-499-7111, that allegedly plays “audio time signals.” When I called it I was connected to a strange piece of outsider art, a sound installation with a hypnotic beat that not only delivers the time in a cool old-timey instructional video accent but also reports the “space weather” in a robot lady voice. I recorded it for you:

But back to the watch: how does the S100 do without help? I turned the automatic radio sync off and tracked the unassisted watch over the course of three weeks. The S100 slowly drifted to -1 seconds, briefly hit -2, and then came back down to -1, then finished at -2. This was with the watch on my wrist for around 22 hours a day, which probably helped keep the temperature steady, but I was still impressed. Then I tracked it for another month and change, on and off the wrist, and it hovered around -2 seconds the whole time. Finally, three months after I started keeping track, it was at -5 seconds.

Now, I know what you’re wondering: what if I want to do some celestial navigation? If I was at sea without a GPS receiver could I determine my position with my S100? It takes about three weeks to sail across the Atlantic with a little luck, and in my unscientific test above, the S100’s unassisted quartz movement beat the first marine chronometers developed by John Harrison to solve the longitude problem in the 1700s (again, Sobel). If it was good enough for King George III, it’s good enough for me. But the S100 could probably even go a little better, since the radio time signals carry over water, sometimes for surprising distances. Sailing west from Europe via the southern passage takes you down from Portugal to the Canaries first, so you’d probably be out of range of the more-northern DCF77 pretty quickly (though maybe with a range extender you could draw things out). Soon, though, you’d begin to catch WWVB; that 70 kilowatt signal from Fort Collins covers impressively broad swathes of the Atlantic. Going west to east, you’d get WWVB for a while out of Bermuda, but you’d lose it deeper into the north passage and be in the dark for a couple of weeks before DCF77 came back around on final approach to Portugal. But if my experience is any indication (and of course it isn’t really — this is serious YMMV territory), you could crisscross the Atlantic form Europe to North America and back and never be more more than two seconds off UTC. So if I watch a few more YouTube videos, and get a sextant, a current edition of the Nautical Almanac, a map, a boat, and also learn to sail, I’m all set. 

Verdict

I like the S100. I like its unassuming technical polish, its careful construction (with only a couple of dial elements falling short), its casual competence. I like that it’s out of step with the homage-obsession of the moment and that it’s kind of ugly until you look at it for a while. I like that its manufacture is impressively vertical but nobody gets precious about it because it’s a Casio. I like that no one will want to steal it because it’s a Casio. I like that it’s effortlessly accurate. I like that it listens quietly in the night. 

Addendum: DXing in Oz

Recently (about a year after I first posted this review) I found myself on the east cost of Australia wearing my S100. My limited experience of Australia suggests that it is full of natural wonders, and trucks with snorkel attachments that let the engine breath when most of the vehicle is submerged, and generally well thought-out infrastructure. But despite having phone booths that make calls for nothing, surgically clean public toilets, free gas grills in the parks and a functional public health care system, they turned off their time transmitter at the end of 2002. Nobody's perfect.

Upon deplaning you can still set your time zone on the S100 (SYDney, in my case) and the watch appropriately adjusts relative to the previously set zone, but this pauses radio syncing until you come back to civilization.

However, I'd seen anecdotal reports that radio-synced watches in Australia can sometimes receive the signal from Japan's JJY. Curious, I set my watch to Japan's time zone (TokYO) and left it on a north-facing windowsill of my Airbnb in the small beach town of Marcoola, about an hour north of Brisbane. In the morning I was delighted to see that it had successfully received the time overnight. Probably from the Haganeyama transmitter in Saga, but maybe from the Otakadoyayama transmitter in Fukushima -- the watch checks both, which provide overlapping coverage on 40 and 60 KHz. Then it was just two clicks of the crown back to SYD, and I was all set.

For those who are, as was I, a little fuzzy on the geography of this part of the planet, let me put this feat in perspective. JJY is designed to reach out about a thousand kilometers from its two transmitters, handily covering the home islands. There's no need to go father. Japan isn't in the business of giving anything to China, and they have their own transmitter anyway (I tried to pick that one up, too, but no dice). But the crow-flies distance from Saga to Marcoola is more than 7,000 kilometers. Granted, a lot of that is over open water, but still. Color me impressed.

JJY is of course the S100's mother station. It would have been the first signal the watch received when it woke up in the Yamagata factory. I wonder if hearing it again felt like coming home.

I’ll refer you to contemporary reviews from the usual suspects for objective performance data, mostly restricting myself here to the hors piste details and digressions for which I am justly famous. I will say that the sensor was capable in 2019 and remains so today. Its origins are shrouded in mystery, but it could be made by a company then unfortunately called TowerJazz, now known as Tower Semiconductor (much better, guys). Or it might just be a Sony. Like nearly all big sensors of the last few years, it’s wildly overqualified for taking pictures of your cats and kids, unless you keep them in a candlelit cave. And even then, it would do ok. By most metrics it holds its own against other sensors of its size and resolution in current models.

The S1 was generally well received by the photo press. The 2019 reviews boil down to: “Pretty great if you don’t mind the weight; too bad about the autofocus.” It cost $2,500, which seemed like a lot back then because we couldn’t see the future. Cost is part of what makes this camera particularly interesting now. If it came out today, MSRP might be a kilo-buck higher and its specs would hardly be different. Second hand, you can buy it all day on MPB for less than 1,200 EUR, and if you’re ready to poke around inefficient local marketplaces and do some unbundling, you can have it for under a grand. Meanwhile, contemporary competitors like the Sony A7 III go for hundreds more and lack a lot of the special sauce that makes the S1 interesting.

Plus, a side effect of the S1’s odd market position is that it’s easy to find one that hasn’t been abused. Most of these have not been smashed around in conflict zones or indy movie productions; they’ve been on a cruise or two, covered a few little league games, and spent the majority of their lives in a well-padded case. Avoid the few wedding veterans and you’ll be fine. Mine had just a thousand shutter cycles on the odometer.

Some Background

Leica introduced the L-Mount (originally called the T-Mount) on some quirky APS-C mirrorless cameras that the company released in 2014. Just a year later a full frame mirrorless model with the same mount appeared, suggesting that Leica had planned to accommodate the larger sensor all along (the old APS-C lenses work in a crop mode). The SL cameras are hideously expensive for what they offer, but the Leica fairy dust ensures that at least some people swear by them. I’m sure the lenses are optically outstanding, but they’re inevitably heavy and the premium pricing feels wrong on something with an RoHS label on it; the M rangefinder lenses that are just brass and glass seem more deserving. The SL line mystifies me, and it feels even more dentisty than the Panasonic S cameras.

I don’t know who asked who to dance, but at some point Leica teamed up with Panasonic and Sigma to form the L-Mount Alliance. Panasonic and Leica have a long and tangled history in the digital age: at one point Leica was selling red-dotted cameras that were essentially rebadged Panasonic models, so you paid the Leica premium for a camera that could also be had for much less in the same store, which seemed weird. Panasonic also licenses the Leica name to decorate some of its lenses, presumably an effort by a Japanese electronics maker to confer some cachet on its products. (Panasonic, a company so unsexy that it decided to write “Lumix” on its fake prism humps. Not “Nikon,” like Nikon does, or “Canon” like Canon, or “Sony” like Sony. ) I don’t know if that fooled anyone, but Panasonic’s camera division feels like it’s on stronger footing than some of the competition. In mid-2020, Panasonic and Leica made a vague announcement that they were collaborating on technology and branded the effort “L2.” The first fruit of that is apparently the processor in the new Panasonic S5 II, which I’m sure is fine but doesn’t exactly get the heart racing.

On the consumer side, Panasonic is best known as a maker of Micro Four Thirds hybrid stills/video cameras that lean into the video side, but it also makes broadcast video equipment, and TVs, stereos, shavers, air conditioners, in-car electronics, industrial HVAC systems, supply chain solutions, factory robots. Panasonic will be around long after the last camera aimed at enthusiast photographers ships. And I think Leica will, too. Leica will exist, selling rangefinders that need film that’s no longer made, a hundred years after people have stopped taking photos and have uploaded their minds to the cloud.

The third amigo in the L-Mount Alliance is Sigma, a company that I can’t help but love. They so crazy! Their lenses have kept the mainstream camera makers, who would otherwise gouge you mercilessly, a little bit honest, and they’re still made in Japan. Their own cameras, which normal people have never heard of, are certifiably bonkers. They used to have a proprietary mount, but now, thanks to the Alliance, you can put insanely expensive Leica lenses or rationally reasonable Panasonic lenses on your nutball Sigma camera, or mix and match as you see fit.

Recently, DJI joined the Alliance, but I don’t care about drones.

So, a Veblen-powered camera maker that popularized 35mm photography, an international electronics megacorp, and a substantial but quirky family business walk into a bar. Over sake and schnapps they hammer out the L-Mount Alliance, and we have a new (kind of) mirrorless full frame mount option. It joins Sony’s E-mount, the early mover that basically created the market, and Canon’s RF and Nikon’s Z mounts, woefully late to the party but already dancing sweatily. Is there room for one more on the dance floor?

To switch metaphors, I think the slowest wildebeest in this herd is pretty obvious. Camera buyers can smell fear. My guess is that the S1’s depressed resale value represents some justified dubiousness that the mount will remain supported for the long term.

Lucky for me, I’m not a long-term thinker. Since I started buying used, I try on systems like clothes off the clearance rack. I went all into Nikon’s full frame DSLRs a while back, viciously depreciated by the deathwatch tick of mirrorless encroachment, had a blast, then sold out. The whole experiment ended up costing about 100 EUR after transaction friction. Miraculous.

And sometimes, the lagging wildebeest has some surprises left in it. Let’s not forget that while Sony ushered in the full-frame mirrorless revolution with the A7 in 2013, it was actually Panasonic and Olympus that got the mirrorless ball rolling back in 2008 with the first Micro Fourth Thirds cameras. Olympus sold its camera division in 2020, but Panasonic soldiers on. Sigma cameras are acts of irrational devotion, and maybe loss leaders that are imagined to drive lens sales. Leica exists beyond the constraints of conventional economics. So who’s to say what the future of the L-Mount will be?

Matter Matters… Or Does It?

Even mainstream camera reviews, so often oddly aphasic on the issue of weight, reliably comment on the mass of the S1. It is the only single grip mirrorless body in production to top a kilo with battery and card. Yes, that’s over 10 newtons of force pulling you relentlessly towards the center of the Earth. The Canon R3, a double grip camera aimed squarely at professionals that costs over 5,000 dollars, is a shade lighter. Most cameras in the S1’s class weigh hundreds of grams less.

The lightest Panasonic lens adds another 300 grams. That’s a lot less than any Leica L-Mount lens, but it’s something. For perspective, camera and lens add up to a full bottle of wine, a corkscrew, and a small bag of crackers. Many are the times I’ve left home so laden, but coming back, my load would be considerably lightened. Not so with the S1.

But is it really so much? Yes and no. I can wear my EM-5 III and the Oly 25mm 1.8 lens all day in my Osprey Daylite Sling and basically forget I’m carrying it. The S1 needs a little more room, but it does fit into my small Tenba shoulder bag. But for me, it turns out that one shoulder is not enough to comfortably carry the S1, even with a reasonable lens like the Panasonic 50mm 1.8. I was a little surprised — after all, that’s not even two and half times heavier than my Oly kit, and that seems to weigh nothing at all. Primary school math tells me double zero should still be zero, but no.

My first solution was to put the S1 in a backpack, which spreads the weight across two shoulders. This make a huge difference for transporting, if not shooting, and transporting is really the thing. I must also admit that my photography curriculum is less physically demanding now than it once was. In the old days I used to tramp around dusk til dawn with a camera, but now, with a brood of three in tow, there are lots of breaks built into even an ambitious outing.

My second solution was to reconsider the value of comfort and convenience. Maximizing these two factors is so deeply engrained in a culture broadly defined by consumer capitalism that, I realized, I have never even considered if they really mattered. Upon reflection, I think their importance has been overstated, perhaps even entirely misunderstood. Pretty much everything was less convenient and comfortable in pretty much every time before our own, but we do not seem to be massively happier for it. Carrying this banal assertion forward leads to an obvious deduction that seems largely ignored: further enhancements to comfort and convenience are not likely to make us happier.

Now, my mercifully brief exposures to actual pain, mostly bouts of tendonitis and back aches, leave no room for philosophizing; real pain makes life less good. It sucks the light right out of the afternoon. If you have to live with it you certainly can, but it’s better not to. Yet it seems to me that the worthy goal of minimizing pain has been conflated with the avoidance of slight discomfort; the later has been elevated to the position of the former in a way that’s a disservice to everyone.

Inconvenience has also been reframed as a dire symptom of inefficiency, that unquestioned root of all evil in an Amazon-ideal society. The notion that Amazon might not actually be ideal has been percolating for some time, but the discourse usually seems to stop at questions of homogenisation, monopoly, worker exploitation and the like, without drilling deeper into the assumptions that late stage capitalism works so hard to inculcate in us.

I write this, fully aware that I get enraged when someone pays with a check in front of me at the grocery store. I remain coated in the tar of our assumptions, even if I can see and smell the black sticky stuff. But I will now make what would have seemed a radical assertion to me just a few months ago: that an extra few hundred grams of camera and the attendant minor shoulder soreness it might occasion will not negatively impact my photography, the enjoyments of being out in the world with people I care about, or my memories of the moments I try to pin down in images. So far, my experience with the S1 bears this out, but I’ll check back with you when it gets hot again and sweat comes into the equation.

Room With a View

The fate of mirrorless hinged on whether electronic viewfinders and screens could replace the optical viewfinders of DSLRs. For most of photography’s history, viewfinding involved increasingly baroque ways of channeling the actual photons flying off the subject into your eye, and the screens on digicams were not a satisfactory replacement for that. The early EVFs, which started showing up in “bridge” cameras (digicams with DSLR aspirations) were a joke: low resolution, slow refresh rates, wonky colors, extreme contrast. I had one, a Konica Minolta A200, and only resorted to the EVF when ambient light made the rear screen unviewable. In those cases it was better than nothing, but it was more a rough composition guide than a way to see what an actual photo might look like.

The first impressive electronic viewfinder I experienced was the accessory EVF for the Sony NEX 5n, introduced in 2011. It initially retailed for half as much as the camera itself, but I bought a used one later on for a hunge and was impressed. It used an XGA OLED panel, which in EVF speak is 2.4 million dot resolution. I guess because early digicam screen resolutions were so low, marketers took to quoting the resolution in “dots” rather than “pixels,” with dots being the display’s subpixels, so you generally get three dots for every pixel.

My next mirrorless camera, the original Olympus E-M10, had a built-in EVF, but it was only a 1.44 million dot (SVGA) panel. Years later, during the pandemic, I bought an old Sony A7, which took me back up to 2.4 million dots, and then a much newer Oly E-M5 III, also 2.4 mil dots, but with an OLED panel for deeper blacks. A few months before Olympus unveiled the super-light, reasonably-priced E-M5 III, Panasonic dropped the S1, with a 5.76 million dot EVF, the highest resolution then available. At the time, I was not at all interested in an expensive, mammoth-sized full frame camera. But time has a way of changing hearts and whittling down the price of electronics, and so here I am, a proud owner of the best EVF money could buy in 2019. How good is it?

Pretty goddamn good. In normal indoor light, when the dynamic range of the scene is narrow and light levels are moderate, I dare say the EVF looks eerily like an optical viewfinder, except that corner-to-corner sharpness is better than what you’d find in an SLR because the viewfinder optics are dealing with a tiny display rather than a big slab of ground glass. In bright light, the EVF is dimmer than an OVF would be, but the substantial round eye cup does a good job of keeping extraneous light out of your eye so the EVF looks bright enough. In dim light, the EVF looks much better than an OVF because you can actually see what’s going on thanks to the efficient light sponge of a big modern sensor.

Of course when the dynamic range of the scene exceeds the sensor’s capability you’ll see areas blow out or go black in the EVF, but that’s arguably more useful, if less beautiful, than the cheerfully optimistic view of the world an OVF gives you.

The improvement from the 1.44 megadot E-M10 to the 2.4 megadot E-M5 III was very noticeable, but even the newer Oly leaves something to be desired. There is still obviously much less detail than you’d see in a good optical viewfinder. I can’t confidently say that of the S1’s EVF. Even more dots might look better, but I’m not sure, and it seems it will be quite a while before I find out. The S1 broke ground with its EVF, but the industry has not rushed to beat it; several years after its introduction the standard highish-end EVF resolution has settled around 3.6 megadots. Only the top-end cameras, generally costing a lot more than the S1, get the 5.76 megadot treatment. There are also a few models that leap up to 9.44 megadots, but these are outliers. My guess is that the upward trend in EVF resolutions is plateauing in the face of power consumption issues and diminishing returns. I don’t think most buyers are clamoring for more anyway — as usual, my obsession with this seems rather niche. It’s interesting that the best-EVF-specs record holder before the S1 was another L-Mount camera, Leica’s SL, introduced in 2015 with a 4.4 megadot panel (and a $6k price tag in pre-pandemic dollars). High res EVFs seem to be taking a while to trickle down, which is why it’s exciting that the S1 can be had relatively cheap used.

Knob Feel

I have mixed feelings on the knob feel front.

My first impression of the two main control wheels was pretty good: not too clicky, fairly well damped. Not super luxy, but satisfying enough. Over a few months of shooting, though, I’m having second thoughts about the rear (thumb) wheel. Each click feels like it subtends a pretty broad arc, and there’s something about the way the wheel starts and stops that bothers me. Stiction. As you apply force, the wheel doesn’t move at all, until it suddenly does. There’s almost no roll to the movement: it’s a bit herky-jerky. This reduces the confidence that I can move the wheel through a given number of clicks with a given input; I feel like I have to give it discreet pulses of force for precision. I don’t have the same beef with the front wheel, which has a more bell-shaped resistance curve to its clicks.

The third wheel, around the d-pad, feels a little dull. Acceptable but uninspired. The mode dial feels very nice: precise, with satisfying, broad-shouldered resistance and a hefty thunk as you change settings. I’m not a big fan of the center button that you have press down before turning the dial (why not make it a toggle so I can decide if I need it, like on my EM5 III?) but it’s not a dealbreaker.

The power switch flips with a nicely positive click. Solid, short throw. Ergonomics are good enough, but not as good as a well-implemented shutter button collar, which remains my ideal. The small size of the switch flirts with being fiddly, though probably just escapes it; it could be a little bigger. Turning the camera on is easy enough, but turning it off requires you to shift your grip in a way that you wouldn’t with a shutter button collar.

Speaking of that shutter button. Unlike every other autofocus camera I’ve used, the S1’s shutter release doesn’t have a detectable first stage. It takes a very light touch to press it down, and at some point the camera will take a picture: there’s no tactile feedback when you pass through the AF-on region to the shutter release point. I only use back-button focus so once I got used to the light touch (which resulted in quite a few accidental photos of the ground) I was fine, but this design decision is mystifying.

The other buttons are mostly unremarkable. They feel weather-sealed, which they are. They don’t offend me, but they aren’t exciting.

There’s a collar on the mode dial that clicks nicely between drive modes, and I also like the feel of the tiny S/C/M focus mode collar around the AF mode button, which is hard enough to turn but then locks neatly into the next position.

The battery and memory card doors spring open confidently, and the battery itself literally leaps out of the camera when you depress the retaining tab: be ready to catch it. I’d rather have it like this than an anemic spring that barely pushes the battery out enough to grab, but it really is like a projectile weapon.

The screen feels reassuringly solid when you lift it. And none of this flippy bullshit that reviewers and videographers seem to want; this is a proper tilting screen that you can pop up for quick look-down shooting. It also tilts out along the other axis, but you need to fiddle with a lock switch to do that.

Overall, I was expecting a bit more in terms of knob feel because of the S1’s weight and positioning, but the camera generally feels excellent in the hands, presumably due to its solid construction and good materials choices. I have to believe that the weight Panasonic put into the S1 plays a role here, because it’s really not clear what else it’s for. The S1 is large, but it’s not huge. It has a magnesium chassis under all that black plastic, but so does pretty much every other camera in its class. Is that magnesium just thicker? Do the optics in the EVF weigh a lot? Is it the muscular sensor stabiliser? All of the above? I don’t know.

Oh, I also like to touch on sonics in the knob feel section. The S1 has the quietest shutter I’ve heard in a full frame camera. Much, much quieter than the mirror slap of an SLR like the Nikon D750, but also far more discrete than the early Sony A7 series cameras I’ve heard. It’s amazing close to my Oly E-M5 III in terms of both quantity and quality of sound. Indoors even in a fairly intimate ambiance, it won’t distract people. On the street, no one will hear it over the typical city background rumble unless you’re so close that they’re definitely already aware of you. This is all a big plus in my book.

AF AF

Most contemporary reviewers seized on the S1’s autofocus performance as its most glaring weakness. They would have been primed to do so because while everyone else in the world had gone to on-sensor phase detect AF technologies, Panasonic in 2019 still clung stubbornly to contrast detect AF. Reading out a phase detection sensor tells the camera how far out of focus (and in which direction) the lens is. Contrast detection is relative: the camera looks for contrast in the image, and if it doesn’t find it, it refocuses and tries again. By trial and error, it hopefully finds a contrast maximum. In practice, this can happen extremely quickly for single AF modes, but things tend to fall apart when continuous AF is used on moving subjects.

Panasonic bet on a homemade flavor of contrast detection that it dubs “Depth from Defocus,” which involves jiggling focus quickly and analysing the out-of-focus areas to suss out more information about where the lens should be driven. In the S1, this jiggle happens at an impressively fast 480 Hz. You can actually see it in the viewfinder, especially in out-of-focus areas of the image. It seems to really bother some people, but me, not so much. I think it’s more of a problem if you’re shooting video since the effect would be recorded in the final output, but I haven’t messed with that.

As I was writing this, Panasonic announced the S5 II, its first camera with phase detect autofocus. I don’t know if this represents capitulation to reviewer pressure or an acknowledgement that DFD’s strengths don’t balance its weaknesses, but it’s safe to assume that the successor to the S1 will have on-sensor phase detect AF as well.

But back to this S1. Single AF is fast AF. And accurate. That’s not hugely impressive, though, since most cameras I’ve used in the last five years could claim the same.

Continuous AF, which I was prepared to be disappointed by, is fairly capable. It’s certainly much better than my phase detect-equipped Olympus E-M5 III, which can’t keep a kid running towards the camera in focus for love nor money. It might be as good as the Nikon D750 (with tried-and-true off-sensor phase detect AF) I had earlier this year, but I sold that on so I can’t do a head-to-head comparison. The S1 is most likely to drop the ball when the kid is closer, which makes sense since the depth of field drops with magnification.

Besides the basics of focusing on what’s under an AF point, we also now expect cameras to decide where that AF point should be. This is the first camera I’ve used that doesn’t just grab the closest big object and find faces, but also claims to detect whole people and animals, wherever they are in the frame. I was dubious that this would work usefully, but it’s impressively effective.

For example (depending on which focus mode is active), if the camera doesn’t find an obvious face, you might see an orange box around a whole person the camera has decided to focus on, with other people boxed in white. You can in theory redirect focus to other people with the joystick, but in practice this is fiddly even if you’ve left the joystick enabled, which guarantees other problems (see Dumb Stuff, below). But often it grabs the right person anyway, even when their back is turned. Sometimes it will also lock specifically onto a head, again, even if the head’s face is not visible. I don’t keep company with many non-human animals, but I tested the animal finding on some birds at the park and it seemed to work well enough.

Panasonic says all this happens thanks to “deep learning,” which, sure. I don’t know enough about what’s going on at the compute level in modern cameras to assess how powerful they really are, but the S1 seems ready to flex. I was initially dismissive of the fancy AF functionality claimed by OMD Solutions (nee Olympus) for its latest flagship camera, which involves similar advanced subject detection, but now that I see it can actually work pretty well, I’d like to see what tricks the OM-1 can manage. One day, when it’s cheaper.

So, look, I’m not versed in the very latest AF feats from Sony and Canon, but the AF on the S1 seems just fine to me. Maybe it’s because I’m using the camera with firmware version 2.1, while most reviewers would have tested the camera closer to launch. Maybe my standards are just low.

If you really care about AF performance, you should be prepared to do some reading before getting the most out of the S1. Panasonic published a 48-page PDF “guidebook” on the S-series AF system. Maybe because the distinction between menu options like “1-Area (Human Detection)” and “1-Area+(Human Detection)” is not crystal clear. This in addition to the 527-page printed (!) manual included with the camera. There are three independently adjustable AF parameters, and then four presets of those parameters that Panasonic offers for given situations, outlined in the guidebook. The examples can be surprisingly specific: “Hawk / Eagle” or “Dog / Cheetah” when “Enlarged in center. From the front” calls for preset 2, while someone swimming a breaststroke or butterfly warrants preset 3. I’ve mostly left it on preset 1, which covers not just children, but also bicycles, ballet, and horseback riding. But not equestrian jumping (preset 3) or “Horse racing: cornering” (preset 4). So, RTFM, or maybe just don’t.

Dumb Stuff

Every digital camera I’ve ever used has some dumb stuff: the kind of things that make you wonder if the designers actually use cameras to take pictures on a regular basis. These things are often totally ignored in normal reviews, so let me bitch about some here.

Deleting photos is dumb. By default, deleting a single photo take four presses on two different buttons. You can eliminate one press by setting the default choice for “Do you want to delete?” to “Yes,” but c’mon. I’m all for the nanny state, but nanny cameras should be hidden in teddy bears. Let me just press the delete button to delete something. I’m a big boy.

Compression for raw files is also dumb, at least compared to Olympus. The Panasonic files are too big, but not for a good reason. I found some people who seem to understand why, and you know what? I’m not going to even try to get my head around it. You’ll just need more hard drive space sooner than otherwise.

I initially thought the customization of the control wheels was totally dumb, but it turns out that it’s only a little dumb. I thought that you couldn’t assign exposure comp to the two main dials because the menu section for assigning functions to those dials does not allow it by default. I looked in the manual, and googled, to no avail. But finally with some more menu browsing I figured out that there’s another menu item called “Exposure Comp” which does let you assign it to one of the wheels. But you still can’t assign it to either wheel, i.e., so that whichever wheel is doing the A or S changing, the other wheel will be exposure compensation.

Another minor dumbosity regarding control configuration: the joystick. By default, its main job is to move the AF point around. And by default it will do so as you continually bump it while carrying the camera, so that when you pull up to take a shot you’ll find the AF point in some random place. You can turn this off, but then you can’t press the joystick to cycle through detected subjects. You can assigned about 800 functions to most of the buttons on the camera, but not that subject cycle command. To be fair, I find that all cameras now have programable function buttons that seem to offer limitless flexibility, but inevitably the one thing I want to do isn’t on the menu.

Anyway, I’m sure I could go on but you’ve probably already skipped ahead. I should have just written: Like every other digital camera I’ve ever used, the Panasonic S1 offers vastly more configurability than I need while not offering a few options I want, and is plagued by some annoying design decisions that I can easily live with if I don’t think about them.

Trappings of Luxury

There are subtle signs, beyond the apparently superlative build quality, that Panasonic pulled out the stops for the S1 in an effort to make a good first impression for its new line. There’s not just one printed manual in the box, but six, a veritable rosetta stone of camera guidance. Plenty of cameras today come with a quick-start sheet that points you to a pdf for the details. I don’t much care in practice, but the show of dead trees is weirdly reassuring.

Panasonic also includes a battery charger, which in the good old days would not have been worthy of comment, but you can’t assume these things any more. Not only that, it has a progress indicator that shows whether the battery is below 50%, between 50 and 80%, between 80 and 100% or full. Be still my beating heart. (It also charges via its USB-C port. With a Power Delivery-compatible charger, it’ll suck down 24 watts when the battery’s low, so you can get back in action pretty quickly. If you use some random old AC USB adapter, the trickle charge of 2.5 watts will take forever to juice up the battery.)

Adaptation

This isn’t unique to the S1, but one of the fun things about full frame mirrorless cameras is that essentially any lens made to cover 35mm film can be used with an adapter. There must be some obscure mount nobody makes an adapter for, but I haven’t found it. So you have a century of glass to choose from. This is partly how I justified buying an S1 (my day job sometimes involves verifying the functionality of old lenses). But I also think it’s fun, particularly with an EVF as good as the S1’s. When you’re manually focusing, a good EVF is key. It’s also just more fun.

Fun, but not all the time. Some people only use adapted lenses, but while I did that for a time back when I had my Sony 5n, ultimately I’ve become a nativist when it comes to glass. But I do get a big kick out of doing it occasionally, which is why I’ve illustrated this post with pics of the S1 wearing lenses of varying outrageousness.

In Conclusion

The Panasonic S1 presents an unusual value at the beginning of 2023. Despite being a current model as of this writing, it is deeply discounted on the secondary market because of its age and stiff competition from brands with more traction in the full-frame mirrorless segment.

A used S1 is the cheapest route to a transcendent electronic viewfinder and it may remain so for some time to come. The last few years indicate that camera makers won’t prioritize EVF performance in any but the highest-end models anytime soon, and the cost of “high end” is climbing faster than the specs that define it.

If an S1 II should emerge, it could push S1 prices even lower, especially if the phase detect implementation is competitive. On the other hand, Panasonic might also introduce the S1 II at a higher price than the original, given the way of things, which would offset that effect.

But the future is the future, while we live forever in the now and the past that informs it. I think the S1 is something special because it was Panasonic’s first play for a piece of the full frame market. It had to be really good to have any hope of luring customers from more established systems, but the same pressure also compelled Panasonic to hold the price down. Given the S1’s qualities, this aggressive pricing must have eaten into the margins, but Panasonic presumably took the long view that you can soak customers later, once they’re committed. This is just my theory, but it feels right.

All of this being said, I still believe Micro Four Thirds is the most practical format for most people who care about photography, including me. The fetishization of “full frame,” a term I use in protest, is a sign of the the decadent end-times of amateur photography. But right now, I’d have to pay something like 100% more for an OMD OM-1 to get a viewfinder as good as the S1’s, which seems silly. And I wouldn’t be able to play with ancient lenses at their natural fields of view. Plus, I already have a nice Micro Four Thirds system, and what’s the fun in that?

For now, the rough trade of the S1 is too seductive to ignore. If its heft builds my core strength, so much the better. It’s a fun camera to use apart from the usual raft of niggles. It feels like quality. It smells of long-chain monomers. Its output looks good if you point it at interesting things. It’s quiet as an owl skimming over moonlit snow. When I lift it to my eye, I am simultaneously there and not-there, and isn’t that the point?

Prologue

My quest obviously points towards Micro Four Thirds, but that reasonably sized sensor turns out to be a red herring. In 2013, Panasonic explored extreme compactness with the 204 gram Lumix GM1, followed by the 211 gram Lumix GM5 in 2014, followed by… nothing. The GM5 remains a cult camera today despite some fairly serious issues (that could be addressed now) because Panasonic abandoned the line. 

Olympus (hollowed be thy name) did something wonderful by making its EM-5 III lighter than the EM-5 II, which is why I own it, but it’s still a bit chunky for a coat pocket at 414 grams. The Olympus Pen-series cameras started out impressively small and light, but they have bulked out over the years, to the point where they hardly make sense given the sacrifice of the viewfinder. 

And then there’s the M43 lens issue: this is where the real opportunity for compactness lies, since the immutable physics of casting an image circle of a given size cannot be magicked away by Moore’s law and better battery chemistry. But Olympus only makes one pancake lens, which is wide and slow. Panasonic’s 20 mm f/1.7 (87 grams) is more interesting to me but it’s kind of wide and has famously sluggish autofocus. 

What about Sony, the destroyer of worlds? Its mirrorless E mount APS-C cameras started by mapping out promising sub-300 gram territory in 2010: hail the NEX C3 (225 grams), 5N (269 grams), 5T (276 grams), and non-NEX A5000 (267 g). The last Sony to hold the line was 2014’s A5100, at 267 grams.  Now consider the current line-up of Sony’s most compact mirrorless bodies: A6000 (344 g), A6100 (396 g), A6400 (403 g) and A6600 (503 g). The lightest of those, the A6000, is “current” in name only, as it was actually introduced a few months before the A5100 in 2014. 

But even if you feel like buying a seven year old camera, there are no pancake normal lenses for the Sony E mount. You have slowish wide options, the f/2.8 16mm and 20mm, and then there’s the 35mm 1.8, which is fairly light (150 grams) but a stack of pancakes long. And strangely, no third parties have filled the gap. I would almost believe there’s some optical roadblock — I don’t understand lens design well enough to know one way or the other — except that someone has built a reasonably fast pancake 30mm lens for a mirrorless APS-C system. You just have to do a little grave robbing if you want to use it.

Alas, Poor Samsung, We Hardly Knew Ye

Samsung entered the DSLR market in 2005 through a “partnership” with Pentax. I use quotes because it seems like said partnership consisted of Pentax using Samsung sensors, and Samsung rebranding Pentax cameras as Samsungs, and changing the color accents from green to blue. I was aware of this at the time because my first DSLR was a Pentax K10D, and the Samsung version looked like the evil twin version of the same camera. The Samsung lenses were also identical, but were branded “Schneider Kreuznach,” which was probably the first time I realized brands could be pimped out with impunity. Anyway, it was beyond me who would rather buy a DSLR from Samsung (better known as a maker of televisions, phones, refrigerators, air conditioners, memory chips, medical equipment, office buildings, and container ships) than a camera from the storied Pentax. Apparently I was not alone in this because the partnership fizzled out a few years later and Samsung struck out on its own. 

The company launched the NX mount in 2010, a mirrorless APS-C design that confusingly began with a camera that looked like a fully-mirrored DSLR, the NX10. Later that year Samsung introduced the much smaller NX100, which still weighed over 300 grams with a battery (its loaded weight is misstated as 282 grams in some sources: that’s actually without a battery). The NXx00 line gradually got heavier, but Samsung then introduced the NXx000 series, which kept things under 300 grams. With these innovative, slim cameras, Samsung soon displaced the hidebound legacy camera makers who clung to their DSLRs, eventually becoming the leading producer of ILCs.

Just kidding! I remember being puzzled by the NX cameras. Not that they were terrible, or even bad. But there was someone else making innovative, slim APS-C cameras at the same time, and they seemed just a little better in pretty much every way: Sony’s first NEX cameras came to market in 2010, and very quickly got an edge over their Samsung counterparts. I bought a NEX 5n, and I don’t even remember considering an NX alternative. (Let’s just take a moment to reflect on the fact that the two competing mirrorless systems were branded NX and NEX. OK, let’s move on.)

The E-mount lens lineup was also more complete. I was more of a zoom guy back then, and I was impressed with the metal bodied NEX kit zoom (it was all plastic inside, but whatevs). Sony made quite a few lenses, and third parties were quickly on board. And the Sonys had Sony sensors, which were already starting to kick ass.

The last two NX bodies, the DSLR-shaped NX1 and the smaller (but still over 300 gram) NX500, built around a new Samsung 28 megapixel BSI sensor, seem to have been genuinely compelling. But by then the stink of death was on the system. Samsung exited the market, I guess to focus on cell phones, as if anyone would want to take pictures with those. 

It was, by Samsung’s standards, an impressively long commitment to a camera system. Five years and over a dozen cameras was better than the four cameras that emerged from the Pentax partnership, though at least those owners could easily cross back to Pentax when Samsung moved on: they weren’t stuck with lenses for an orphan mount. Those who jumped on Samsung’s first 35mm SLR bandwagon weren’t so lucky. The Samsung SR 4000 was introduced in 1997 with a proprietary mount. It was the first and last of its name. One and done. I didn’t know about the SR 4000 when I ignored the NX cameras, but it seems that as usual a student of history would have had some clues about the future.   

The Samsung Summicron

So why am I nattering on about the NX cameras now, all these years after the last one was shipped? Because my thirsty wandering through the desert of bloated cameras and optically-perfect, boat-anchor lenses led to me an oasis that I had hitherto missed: Samsung’s 30mm f/2 lens. This works out to a just-slightly-wide normal, with a field of view around 45mm-equivalent. And the kicker: it weighs just 68 grams, and protrudes a tad more than 20 millimeters past the mount. On paper, this is the lens I’ve been looking for.

Tracking one down would have been tricky (eBay was showing silly prices, and mostly out of Russia) but I got lucky on the French version of Craig’s List, called leboncoin. Someone was selling one just outside of Paris for a hunge, if I was willing to take the train out to Neuilly, which apparently I was. The lens appears to be unused. The guy who sold it to me had, I believe, a Russian accent. I had my Samsung Summicron (no lightning from Wetzlar has struck me yet).

The NX3000 

Unlike a real Summicron, the 30mm was made for a dead mount. Catnip to me, of course. The upside is that you can get a camera for it pretty cheap. I settled on the NX3000 because it was the last of Samsung’s lighter-weight semi-entry level cameras. It uses the second-to-last sensor for the system, a 20.3 megapixel CMOS. On paper, it looks basic but not too basic. It has a PASM dial, which I took as a good sign. A tilt-up screen, a design I love. A single control wheel around the D-pad, which, OK. I found one on leboncoin for 200 EUR, including the two kit stabilized zooms, which I sold off (yes, amazingly, you can still sell them), effectively making the camera cheaper than free. The body showed no signs of being used, but I did have to spring for a generic battery because the original no longer held a charge.

When I had my lens, my camera, and a working battery, I took a few new-toy-around-the-house shots to get a feel for this corpse I’d dug up. This is not the lightest camera I’ve ever held, but I’ll wager it is the lowest density: in the hand it feels like a hollow mock-up. I’m not complaining, mind you, since the whole point of this exercise is lowering weight, but it bears mentioning. I wish Samsung had taken some of the air out of the camera, but then people would have complained that it was too small to hold. 

I’m not going to give the NX3000 an exhaustive knob-feel treatment. Let’s just say it’s mostly par for the course. The PASM dial actually has nicely damped detents. The single control wheel has reasonable clicks, though the link between turning it and changes to settings is tenuous. It’s not nice, but this is the world we live in, even today. The screen has a smooth feel when you flip it up. It will actually go all the way up so you can use it for selfies, if you’re one of those people. The shutter sounds like a dropped milk carton (empty), but at least it’s not too loud. Power is a button, not a switch, which belies the promise of that PASM dial.

But poking around the apartment, I was cautiously optimistic. Focus seemed reasonably quick and confident in good light. I did, however, notice that it slowed down and became less reliable in low light. Now, contemporary reviews of the camera also noted this, but I forgot that the definition of “low light” has changed in the intervening years. Now, “low light” is something like, “a starlit night with a very thin crescent moon.” But in 2014, low light was something much brighter. Back then, you might not want to perform surgery in low light, but you could definitely read in it. Then, unlike today, low light was something that people lived in.

This would be a problem if this was supposed to be my real camera, but I already have one of those. This was supposed to be my lazy-carry, out-and-about camera, and since I have young kids, I’m usually not out after dark. For the same reason, high ISO performance was not a big concern. 

Soon enough, I went out with the family to the Jardin de Plantes in Paris, which had an outdoor exposition of gaudy models of prehistoric creatures made of brightly-color fabric stretched on wire frames. At night they light up, but of course I was there during the day. Pretty quickly, I realized that the NX3000 and I were not going to get along.

There are a few problems problems. First off, I can’t see the screen in daylight. In sunlight it becomes a black mirror with just a suggestion of a scene on it. Plus, I guess I’ve gotten used to cameras with eye level finders, and forgot that a 3-inch screen, when held at a distance that I can easily focus my eyes on, looks like a wading pool seen from a high dive. 

And then there’s that single control wheel, which I would use to select aperture, being a very type A person. As I alluded to before, you would have to turn it very…slowly…and…very…carefully to get a one-to-one relationship between setting and motion. What did I expect from an entry-level camera from 2014? We forget things, I guess. 

Finally, there’s focusing. I tried a mix of point focus and face/zone focus, because you can’t have face and point active at the same time, which bugs me. I guess Panasonic does this too, but the Panasonics I’ve used are a lot better at finding faces than the NX3000 is. Moving faces, for example, fahgettaboudit. Moving targets in general, for that matter. I tried to document my kids on a carrousel because I don’t have any pictures of them doing that, and it was a frustrating struggle. Might as well pre-focus like you’re using a rangefinder. None of this was helped by the poor screen visibility, which meant that even when the camera had locked focus on something, I wasn’t sure what it was.  

When I got home and pulled the files off the thumbnail-sized micro-SD card, I discovered that my RAW processor, DxO PhotoLab, does not support the camera. I thought I’d checked this, but realized that I’d been fooled because the earlier NX2000 and the later NX500 and NX1 were supported, so I’d assumed the intervening NX3000 would be as well. But no. So, to the jpegs.

Most of my life I’ve been a jpeg shooter, but since I went RAW, I guess I’ve become a snob. The NX3000’s jpegs look really jpegy. Even though I’d set noise reduction to “low,” things looked weirdly smoothed out. Color can be nice, or it can be off, usually in a green direction (as usual, I used cloudy white balance outside to keep the images warm). But probably the biggest problem was that a lot of images were out of focus, something that had escaped me when I was shooting without being able to see the preview. 

What About the Lens?

So, for me, the NX3000 is kind of a nonstarter. It’s just not fun to shoot. But what about that little Korean Summicron? Does it cut the kimchi? 

I believe it does. My days of photographing brick walls are long behind me, but there’s nothing I saw in my short experience with the lens that suggests it’s crippled by its small size. Wide-open, you definitely get some subject separation and the lens isn’t committing any crimes in the corners. Yes, things get a tiny bit smudgy in the extreme corners if you’re pixel peeping. But if you truly need corner-to-corner perfection, there are Zeiss Otus lenses for you.  

I also didn’t notice any chromatic aberration to speak of, though it’s possible the NX3000 is zapping it in post. Bokeh’s mostly acceptable, though as always it depends on a bunch factors.

It’s not a real Summicron, but I would happily put up with more weaknesses than this little lens has in exchange for its tiny, weightless form factor. This is the lens I’ve been looking for. Why, why does it have to be for this mount?

Conclusion

The NX3000 is not a good bet for weight-averse photographers today, even if they’re willing to put up with some faff to get a cheap, lightweight body. Probably because of its everyman-consumer focus (and price point), the NX3000 has not aged well; it just isn’t much fun to use. I think the sensor quality is fine (but I can’t be sure because my raw processor doesn’t support it and I sure as hell ain’t going to start messing around with a new one for the NX3000’s sake),  but the screen and autofocus aren’t quite at the sufficiency point that most of the market was achieving around that time.

The Samsung 30mm f/2 lens, on the other hand, is a tiny gem that would be an asset to any APS-C mirrorless system. Tragically, it’s trapped in NX purgatory. It might be worth exploring it with the NX500, likely a more capable camera in every respect, albeit a slightly heavier one. However, the NX500, even all these years after Samsung took the NX system out behind the barn, commands real money (and the NX1 even more so): too much to justify, at least for me.

I’m selling on the NX3000 and its zooms, but I’m not sure I can part with the 30mm. Maybe one day a cheap NX500 will fall into my lap and I’ll give it another airing. 

The Leica M10. What, a consideration of an almost-current camera? Yes, my friends, strange times demand strange blog posts. Plenty of reviews of the M10 were penned (or videoed, god help us) in 2017, but they focus mostly on irrelevant details like image quality. In this review, I will consider elements more central to the Leica experience.

It has been my privilege to handle a great many classic cameras and quite a few digital cameras as well, but I’ve only come across digital Leica Ms once or twice. This was a long time ago, before I was born again as a film shooter, before I’d been infected with leicaphilia, and I was honestly flummoxed by those absurdly expensive, hard-to-use cameras. But even then, knob feel was important to me so I gave them a fondle all the same. I remember that I was unconvinced.

A decade or so later, I am different, we are all different, never the same river etc. I acquired an M10 recently from a young man in a banker’s suit who counted my gangster-sized sheaf of 50 euro notes with the mechanical efficiency of a blackjack dealer who’s seen a million sad, smoky busts. This is not the kind of camera I generally buy, and I don’t intend to keep it, but before I send it on to someone who really wants it, I will answer a question that has intrigued me ever since I began shooting film in Leica M cameras: was my earlier disappointment with Leica’s digital rangefinders justified, or was I just a philistine? How does a digital M like the M10 feel compared to the classic film Leicas? How does it fondle?

Before we get into controls, let’s take the body itself. This is the low-hanging fruit for Leica: how hard is it to make a robust metal body when price is no object and keeping weight up (aspiring to original Ms, the classiest brick shithouses ever constructed) is the goal? Well, they nail it. The M10 feels delicious in the hand. Rock-solid, dense, with lustrous finishes. I know the body coverings aren’t vulcanite, but they feel fine to me. People give the digital Ms a hard time for the impracticality of removing the baseplate to access the battery and card slot, but Jesus H, you’re not buying a digital rangefinder because you prioritize practicality. The micro-tolerances with which the base kisses onto the body is glorious in a Leica M made in 1957, and that remains true sixty years later. Swapping batteries should not be this fun. Seriously, it should’t.

So, feels in the abstract are good. But in use, in the hand? When introduced, Leica crowed proudly that the M10 was the same exact thickness and width as a classic M: the earlier iterations were a little chunkier. And indeed, when you hold the camera up to your face to take a picture, it does feel like the real deal. However, the M10 is a bit taller than my M2. I would not think it enough to make much of a handling difference, but when I’m not shooting I like to carry a camera with my hand wrapped around it top and bottom, with the top plate snugged into my palm, lens in towards my thigh. This keeps the camera unobtrusive but ready to shoot. And it turns out that those few extra millimeters do change the way the M10 feels here — it’s much less comfortable. But this might just be me. Putting myself in your shoes, which is hard because I’m really very self-centered, I would rate the M10 as a success overall when it comes to replicating the general feel of a real Leica.

Now, let’s get to the controls, and cattily, I’ll start with what’s obviously not there at all: the arming lever. This is neither a double-stroke nor a single-stroke Leica M: no strokes, folks. It feels pretty weird to just press the shutter button repeatedly and have the camera keep taking pictures. In my darker moments I’ve dreamed of a digital camera with a manually armed shutter, but that way madness lies (there was that one Epson…). You just don’t get to wind on and that’s that, so we’re starting with quite a handicap in the haptic experience category. Can the M10 catch up?

Well, it does does have some control points that a mechanical Leica does not. The shutter button is surrounded by a power switch, for example. An M3 does not need a power switch because it is powered by photons and stored kinetic energy and the pure love of photography. The M10 is a computer strapped to some fancy optics, so it needs a Li-ion battery, which means it needs a power switch (does it, really? Could you have it just sleep all the time and wake with a half-press of the shutter? Maybe, but people would complain. People always complain.) Anyway, the power switch feels fine. It’s nicer than the slightly clacky switch on my Olympus EM-5 III, but doesn’t stand out from any number of similarly implemented power switches from Nikon or Pentax. 

Then there’s the much-maligned ISO control. This is really a strange misstep. You have to lift it to change the ISO, a design common in film cameras, where it makes perfect sense because you might (or might not) change it when you load a new roll. For a setting that might be changed shot to shot, it’s bonkers. Lifting it is difficult to do with confidence because it does not want to pop up and there’s not much for your fingers to grip. The whole thing feels fiddly and uncertain. Once it’s up, the dial turns without distinction. Adding insult to injury, the ISO dial occupies the place where the rewind knob would be on an M2 or M3, and lifting those knobs into the turning position is… well, sublime.

I almost forgot to mention it, but there’s a small mode-dependant wheel on the right corner of the M10 that you use for digital BS like zooming in on playback or menu scrolling. It feels OK. Not too clicky, not too mushy, but it is what it is. It does not feel luxurious.

The final entry in the digital-only category, the buttons. Amazingly, the M10 only has three of them. Astoundingly (and I’m veering into traditional review territory, but I can’t help myself), the M10 feels by and large like a fully functional, intuitive digital camera with just those three buttons (no touchscreen yet). This is exactly what I’d expect a company like Leica to get wrong, and it’s a grand slam. End digression: for our purposes here we only care about what the buttons feel like. Unlike knob (or wheel or dial or ring) feel, I find button feel hard to qualify. At best, buttons are not a disaster. The bottom of the scale is pretty easy to establish — something like a late 90s entry-level Canon SLR has buttons that are clearly about as far as you can fall. Mushy, soggy, etc. But what does a great button feel like? I have to believe that I’ll know it when I feel it. Perhaps it is waiting for me on a 50-pound piece of test equipment manufactured in 1962. The M10’s buttons do feel good: short-travel but with crisp actuation, broad and flat across the finger tip. I don’t think they’re truly great, but neither do they let the camera down.

Oh, I said there are only three buttons, but there’s also a d-pad. It feels clicky and precise like the other buttons, but it’s sized for a race of tiny primate photographers. They love Leicas, and their basketball players are four feet tall.

Circling back to the shutter button: it also feels good enough. This is actually something I’m not terribly precious about, though — most cameras manage a satisfying shutter release, and I tend to only notice when something really balls it up, like the Yashica Electro 35. 

When you press that button, you hear a click. I consider shutter sonics as a separate but related aspect of camera fondling, so within the scope of this review. Compared to the cloth shutter I’m familiar with from the M2 and M3, the M10 is louder but the energy sounds like it’s concentrated at higher frequencies, so it might not carry far. It’s much quieter than the only full frame mirrorless focal plane shutters I’m personally familiar with, in the first and second gen Sony A7, which have all the subtlety of a ballista hurling a bolt downrange into mounted armor. It’s much louder than the shutter in my Olympus EM-5 III, which has a beautifully damped *whuff* sound, almost like a sharp exhalation. 

But now, let’s consider the shutter speed dial. This part of a classic Leica is, for me, the standard against which a knob with detent positions is judged and generally found wanting. I was ready to be disappointed by an ersatz effort to mimic this feel in what is really just a jumped-up electronic switch, but the M10 holds its own here. It feels legitimately mechanical. Not exactly like my M2, but the difference is subtle and honestly I’m not sure which I’d prefer in a double-blind test. This is what I remember being disappointed by in the earlier digital Ms I tried, so either Leica has upped its game or my tastes have evolved. 

And that’s how an M10 feels. Most of this review sounds like griping, but that’s because I’m considering all the bits that don’t really belong on a Leica M. If you look at what really counts, the shutter speed selector, the shutter button, and the overall feel of the body, the M10 does it right. The rest is just what the M10 has to do to be a digital camera, and it does it at least as well as anything else. It’s not transcendent. Maybe that was what left me with a sour feeling the first time I handled a digital M: the whole thing is not magic, and I thought it had to be to justify itself. Now that I know and love the M, I see more clearly what matters. All of that, feels-wise, the M10 gets remarkably right.

If you don’t want me to harsh your vibe, stop here. I won’t judge.

I’ve answered the title question of the post: in the hand, the M10 does a pretty solid impression of a film M with an endless 35mm roll. But answering it, I realize a larger question remains open: what defines “success” for a digital simulacrum of an analog camera? Leica’s digital Ms are indisputably the best digital rangefinders: they’re also the only ones. Perhaps because the market is small and there’s no reason for other players to pursue it. Or/and, perhaps because without Leica’s history, the products don’t make sense. Can an M10 exist if HCB never used an M3? Whatever the reason, there’s nothing to compare them to.

If rangefinder focusing and framing give you the jollies, the M10 will do the trick. If we locate feeling in nerves under the skin, the M10 feels like a Leica. But if psychedelics have taught us anything, it’s that sense lives in the brain, not nerve endings. What does the M10 feel like in the mind? I can only speak for myself, because we are each irredeemably alone in our skulls. To me, an early M feels, in the mind, like the pinnacle of something. It’s a high water mark of human achievement, albeit very narrowly defined. We needed a lot more “progress” to get to the M10, but our times strongly suggest that progress sometimes isn’t. Part of me loves the feel of the M10. Part of me is dismayed by beautifully machined e-waste. No human thing is forever, but classic Ms let me pretend. A digital M reminds me that I’m pretending. 

Recently I was buying some cameras from a man who I understood to be a Dominican friar, of Iraqi descent and attired in an impeccable suit, just a shade off International Klein Blue. It occurred to me later that the natty suit meant he was not a friar, but rather part of the constellation of laypeople who aid the Dominican mission without going all-in on the robes and everything. My initial confusion was probably down to neither of us speaking our first language, instead working semi-obliquely in French. He struck me as interesting and I should have paid him closer attention as it seems a situation unlikely to repeat itself, but I was distracted by the cameras on the table between us and so registered little more than the suit and the fact that he was a polite but reasonably effective negotiator.

The cameras were part of the earthly estate of another Dominican who had been promoted upstairs some years earlier. A recent decluttering of the cloister had led to the man in front of me being charged by the surviving brothers with disposing of the equipment in a manner profitable to the order. The deceased Dominican had excellent taste in cameras. Of greatest interest to me was a Zeiss-Ikon Contarex with its 50mm Planar and a few other lenses.

I knew a little about the Contarex but I’d never handled one, and the moment I touched the thing my fingers sang. I had not until that moment experienced a camera that was not a Leica but that felt, in its inert state, like a Leica. I had come to assume that such a thing could not exist, so to be suddenly confronted with its factuality was a minor shock. It had that special mix of materials, minute tolerances, and subliminally perfect finishing so familiar from that other fabled German marque.

And yet, knowing that the Contarex is a 35mm SLR, my mind also recoiled. The weight, the sheer size of it, were astounding. It is a titanic camera: in its size, its mechanical complexity, its engineering bravado, its possible-then-but-not-now-ness, its unapologetic technical luxury... and in its hubris, its doomed fate. Zeiss built the Contarex to be the uber-SLR, king of kings, and the camera helped sink the company as surely as it would drown a photographer who fell overboard with one around his neck.

In a way, the Contarex is the final shot in the war between east and west over what cameras would be in the second half of the 20th century. Before World War II, Germany was the undisputed world leader in the production of excellent cameras (I suspect America was the world leader of junk-ass camera production, though I don’t have numbers to back that up). But Japan was already a player, initially through rampant copying of German designs, but very quickly with its own innovations.

Going into the war, the rangefinder reigned as the serious 35mm camera design, even though SLRs had been sold since the mid-30s. SLRs, Jim, but not as we know them. Manual mirror reset, manual aperture cocking, and tiny waist-level finders (good luck seeing them at waist level) were the norm. Crap SLRs, basically, but in that crap were the seeds of the future. And crap is fertilizer. Like bombs.

After the bombs stopped dropping, the pentaprism SLR sprouted from that crap. In either Germany or Italy, depending how you tally. What is it with fascists and cameras? Anyway, the pentaprism SLR, or as we know it today, “the SLR,” was the future. The crappy SLRs showed you a tiny view, migraine-inducingly reversed left-to-right. With a pentaprism SLR, you look into a magic hole and see the world through your lens as the gods intended, just with shallower depth of field.

Leica had made its name by essentially inventing the 35mm rangefinder in the 20s, and coming out of the war largely intact, doubled down on rangefinders and launched the M system, the most beautiful and perfect camera system that humanity has yet devised. But as history loves to demonstrate, the beautiful and the perfect do not necessarily win out. Zeiss-Ikon knew this. Though it had been fighting Leica’s rangefinders with its Contax line for years, it already had real SLRs percolating in the 1930s… but events aforementioned intervened.

As you might know, after the war Zeiss-Ikon, like Berlin, was divided in twain: the Reds walked off with everything in the Dresden works that the Allies hadn’t already blasted to shrapnel or melted to slag and formed a communist doppelganger of the original Zeiss-Ikon, dubbed Zeiss-Ikon VEB (which went through a few other names later after losing trademark battles with the legally persnickety capitalists). Western Zeiss got to keep the Zeiss-Ikon name, and the good china, and the dog.

But back to SLRs. Zeiss-Ikon VEB managed to launch the Contax S pentaprism SLR in 1949, and called “First!” since they could yell louder than the Italians at Rectaflex. But it was East German, so, you know. The good Zeiss-Ikon, now based in Stuttgart, launched a consumer-focused pentaprism SLR in 1953, starting the Contaflex (not ContaREX) line. These were designed around a leaf shutter, and my sense is that they did well enough in their time, but today they are mostly unloved, maybe because the lenses are relatively slow.

Meanwhile, Leica was refining their M system of perfect rangefinders. If you were a professional photographer who needed to be nimble in those years, you probably had an M3 or an M2 (I imagine studio work was mostly done with larger formats). But Zeiss-Ikon could feel the wind shifting. The SLR, loath as I am to admit it (and Leica remained in denial into the 60s), has some benefits for working pros. Maybe for everyone. So Zeiss-Ikon prepared to seize the nascent market for a professional SLR. It would be of the highest quality, and expensive as all get-out, but people were sure to buy it because it would be the best. It would be the Contarex.

Zeiss-Ikon announced the Contarex in 1958, but thanks to the tortured development process involved in bringing a built-from-the-ground-up mechanical product of mind-bending complexity into being, didn’t start moving units until 1960. In the intervening year, of course, something happened that shifted the history of cameras. Nippon Kogaku launched the Nikon F in 1959, the camera the company would eventually name itself after.

Did everyone in the Zeiss-Ikon boardroom shit their pants? I wonder. I doubt it. So much that’s shriekingly obvious in retrospect looks like a blur of possibilities when you’re living history forward. But let me whisper back through the time tunnel to those proud Germans: the party is over, meine herren und damen und nonbinary persons.

You can’t overstate the influence of the F. Considering one today, it does not give the impression of being particularly antiquated, even though it arrived before color TVs were common in American living rooms. The basic look and layout were so widely imitated (and iterated on by Nikon itself) that you can draw a straight line back from a modern DSLR to the F of 1959.

Now, consider the Contarex. It is very obviously of another era, maybe even another timeline, where things went decidedly steampunk. The internet is full of people marveling at how heavy and solid the Nikon F is because their fingers are used to plastic trash and everything made of metal is “built like a tank.” The Contarex isn’t built like a tank. It’s built like it was made by gods, or aliens in a post-scarcity society. Aliens with strong backs (or a low-g home world), and some fundamental misunderstandings about how an SLR might be used by primates, and economics, which we can forgive since they don’t use money and probably don’t even have fingers.

We’re only 1,300 words in here, so I hope it’s not too soon to start the review. I decided to write this in part because there aren’t many reviews of the Contarex on the internet, unusual for an interesting classic camera in 2020. I think I understand why. A Contarex body is way too expensive for most people to buy on a lark. Ditto the lenses, of famously excellent optical quality and now, tragically, adaptable for mirrorless digital use. And even people who do buy a Contarex don’t usually feel compelled to crow about how great they are to use. There are probably two reasons for this.

The first is that usable Contarexes are apparently a fairly small subset of existing Contarexes. In the relentless pursuit of excellence, it seems Zeiss-Ikon didn’t worry too much about little things like repairability, or, to some extent, reliability. A design/manufacturing flaw in the way the lens aperture stop-down system works means that if a Contarex lens didn’t leave the factory with exposure problems, it would likely find them on its own soon enough. And apart from that, there are roughly 1,100 other parts in the Contarex body, each capable of failing in interesting ways.

I’m getting this from the site of the inimitable Henry Scherer, and you owe it to yourself to peruse it in all its Web 1.0 glory and eau de grumpy old man. Scherer is probably the most respected repairer of the Contarex and Contax cameras generally, and his site is a bald but ultimately convincing effort to terrorize you into sending your precious camera to him and only him. A side effect of reading it is that you’ll also never want to hand a lens you like to anyone else for service, but I think that’s a price worth paying. But is it worth paying Scherer’s price to repair a Contarex? That’s a more open question, and that’s just me politely saying hells no, if only to convince myself, because a deeper part of me would like nothing more than to spend unreasonable money restoring this beautiful machine to mid-century perfection. Unreasonable money? A basic CLA starts at $1,250. That’s if nothing is actually broken, just to get the thing lubed and adjusted, just for the body. Some people call foul on Scherer, accuse him of price gouging. But Scherer says he spends ten days on each camera he services (ten whole days on one camera: serial, not parallel processing). Now, I can say that I floss every tooth in my head three times a day and that doesn’t guarantee my mouth isn’t a horror of yellow ivory, but I’m inclined to believe Scherer, if only because that’s the world I’d rather live in.

The other reason is that even when a Contarex is working, you might not want to work with it. I’ve mentioned the weight and size, but wait, there’s more. The Contarex may be a dream to touch, but to use it, to actually release the shutter and wind it on, not so dreamy. And before a Contarex lover starts a furious all-caps comment, let me acknowledge that my experience comes from one, unserviced-in-decades example. But let me also say this: it has been my privilege to handle hundreds of similarly vintage cameras. Nikon, Leica, Pentax, Rollei, all the usual suspects and then some. Old cameras don’t usually feel like this.

The great majority of them, for example, still basically work, as long as they don’t have “Foca” stamped on them anywhere. My Contarex seemed to work initially, when I dry-fired it in front of the Dominican, but when I loaded a roll of Fomapan… it promptly tore the film apart. I might not even mention this except that a review of the Contarex I found online (what, you think I’d venture an opinion without first checking the hive mind?) reports the exact same thing happening. The writer claims the advance puts an unusual amount of torque on the film – I’d be more inclined to think this is not how the cameras behaved when they were new, but I don’t really know. Maybe the camera picked up the stink of Communism on that Fomapan and destroyed it out of vengeance for Dresden. Anyway, I next loaded an expired roll of Ilford HP 125 while humming God Save the Queen, and was very gentle about winding on the camera, and experienced no more violence.

Winding on. The pleasure of winding on, or arming or what-have-you, is to me one of the great reasons for shooting film. My gold standard for wind-on feel is the Leica M3 or M2, which communicate to the thumb, the hand, the soul, the perfect balance of ease, resistance, precision, certainty, and reliability. Other cameras can feel nice too, and the great variety of feels is another, somewhat surprising pleasure to explore: you might think that they would all feel similar since you’re just turning gears and tensioning springs, but no.

My Contarex is not fun to wind on. Its principle fault is great variation in resistance between the start and end of the stroke – it gets quite hard for the last third or so, and then stops in a manner that always left me unsure of whether I’d completed the stroke properly or not. The other reviewer I mentioned also experienced this, though he related it with fewer flourishes of language.

Is this age or design? I contacted Mr. Scherer and asked, but he was coy, saying only that these cameras benefit from service. He would not confirm or deny how it would feel $1,250 down the line. If you know, please leave a comment.

So now we’ve got film loaded, shutter cocked. Let’s take a picture. Lay your finger on the nubble sticking up from the center of the frame counter, on the right. And push. A little harder. No, kind of lean into it. There! You’ve taken a photo. You know because the whole frame counter sinks into the camera like a trap floor in some 1980s dream of an Aztec temple swallowing looters. You also hear a ku-thunk, or sometimes, with my camera, a ku…thunk. Something has gotten a bit gummed up and there’s an intermittent delay between when the mirror flips up and the shutter fires. Not something I’ve seen on an F. Just sayin’.

Let’s take a look into the viewfinder, which is famously bright, or allegedly so. I believe it must have been a sight to behold in 1960 because it’s just as bright (though not nearly as big) as the view through my Pentax MX of 1976, a pinnacle of SLR viewfinder design. Zeiss broke ground here, but others built more there later.

Since we’re already in the viewfinder, let’s focus. Turn the focusing ring on that 50mm f/2 Planar. Smooth, smooth, smooth. And light, despite the ancient grease. From one end to the other and back, perfectly even, perfectly damped, after decades. Get that split-prism lined up. OK.

Now grab the shutter speed selector, there on the same column as the frame counter and the film-speed/exposure compensation selector. Turn it. Yes. That’s the feeling we want. It is luxurious, precise, weighty without feeling heavy. Mmmmm. Turn it. Again. From 1/1000th sec down to... what’s this? Stuck at 1/8th sec? Well, you must have the sensitivity set too high. Lift the collar, turn that, feels nice, right? But why? Why not allow slower shutter speeds with faster films? Ask not why. We are not meant to question the motives of our alien gods.

And yet I must, because now it’s time to set the aperture. The aperture, the hole through which light passes in the lens, created by the delicate interaction of thin metal blades – pretty much every other camera maker does this with a ring around the lens. But Zeiss had other ideas. There is a ridged wheel on the front of the camera, just down from the main control column we’ve been twiddling: that is the aperture control. You read the setting from a small display on top of the selenium meter sensor. Turning the wheel causes a 10-bladed mini iris in front of the selenium sensor to mirror the iris in the lens. And that’s how the meter works. Simple in theory, but presumably fantastically complex mechanically.

Apart from point-of-failure issues, there are two problems with this design. The first is purely aesthetic: it doesn’t feel good. The best aperture selector rings, found on Leitz or Pentax Super Takumar lenses, are a joy to turn, to click from one stop to the next. I’ll spare you another rhapsodic digression, just try one if you haven’t. The Contarex’s little wheel has, for one thing, no click stops. Also, it has some play when you change directions (though that might be my aged sample again). But I’m just whining here. The real problem is practical: when you grip the camera with your right hand, your fingers will tend to bump this wheel towards smaller apertures. You get set to shoot wide open, and then after a few minutes of handling the camera, you find yourself at f/5.6. Now, this might be something one can adapt to. Presumably people did. But why?

Anyway, I shot the roll of HP 125, in a bit of a joyless hurry if I’m honest. And then I stand developed it in Rodinal from a crusty old bottle I found behind my color chemistry, a deep rust red like sunken battleships, and got blank film base, with a slightly gray leader. You know how they say Rodinal lasts forever? Wait, what? I could have sworn they said that. Well, I don’t feel like shooting another roll, so the only illustrations you’ll get in this review are of the camera, not with the camera. I don’t think that’s really a problem, though: the world does not agree on much, especially these days, but the opinion that Zeiss lenses of this era were excellent in their time and remain impressive today seems as unanimous as anything. Go find someone shooting them on a Sony camera if you’re really curious.

So, my verdict. The Contarex is a fascinating camera that suggests a world that might have been, but wasn’t. I write that, unusually for me, without misty nostalgia or mourning. Too often, winners win for the wrong reasons: deeper pockets, looser morals, collective idiocies. Yet sometimes, winners win because they’re better. Like the Nikon F.

But If you want a Contarex as a collector’s piece, for fondling, go for it. As a totem of adoration, it has a lot to recommend it. For sheer over-engineering, it’s a hard camera to beat. And while modern homage is closing the circle on the vintage designs it pilfers from, the Contarex stands apart, a beauty without descendants. Rex nunquam moritur.

Every Nomos introduction must mention that the company was born from the ashes of a divided Germany, blooming in the sudden sun that warmed the East just after the Wall fell. That wall stood for a bit less than thirty years, and Nomos has now beat its record: at just over thirty years old, the company has built far more watches than the Wall ever did, and crushed far fewer dreams doing it.

I was going to write, “the sudden sun of capitalism,” but decided it was needlessly cynical. The strange and immensely appealing trick that Nomos pulls off is appearing to truly be the thing that nearly all companies wish to be perceived as – a commercial entity driven by aesthetic and moral imperatives as much as the accumulation of crass lucre. Nearly all of the world’s corporations front like they love us and only want to add rainbows to our daydreams, but statistically… OK, I was going to make up a statistic, but let’s just call it obvious bullshit. Nomos, though… if they’re bullshitting, they’re supreme bullshitters. I’m sure it helps that they’re a relatively small company in a high-margin industry, but still.

The special thing about Nomos watches is that Nomos makes them. Right there in the tiny village of Glashütte, down the road from its extremely illustrious neighbor, A. Lange & Söhne, the OG Glashütte watchmaker. This is remarkable because almost nobody really makes mechanical watches. Even in olden tymes, when watches were an enormous industry, sourcing movements (the ticking guts of the watch) from someone else was common. Now, only a handful of companies in the world make mechanical movements. ETA (of Swatch Group), Sellita, Miyota (of Citizen), Seiko, and then you get into the really fancy stuff, in-house manufactures with production numbers lower than my bowling score. Rolex makes its own watches and makes them very well, and even though Rolex prices start surprisingly low compared to the lofty peaks of haute horologie, Rolex is still synonymous in the public mind with “a stupid amount of money to drop on a watch.”

And then you have Nomos, which builds mechanical watches to an extraordinarily high standard, almost entirely from scratch, for money that, while seemingly extravagant to sane, non-watch people, is an excellent value for what the company delivers. (Incidentally, Rolex turns out something like a million watches per year. Nomos makes around 20,000.)

This is the story of Nomos, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned while loving watches, it’s that stories are what people are actually buying. The stories of the watches and their makers, and the stories that those watches let us tell ourselves and other people. At its basest extreme, that story might simply be: “LOOK AT ME! I HAVE MORE MONEY THAN GOD!” But let’s give ourselves some credit. The world of watches is almost as varied and variegated as the real world. Tell me you like watches, and apart from knowing that your basic needs have already been met, there’s not much I can say for certain about you.

Nomos supports its story with the facts of its existence and products, but also of course with a certain amount of marketing. That certain amount is very little. I have never seen an ad from Nomos for Nomos on the internet, despite having shopped for a Nomos watch for months, which tells you something (I have of course gotten ads for stores that sell Nomos watches). I haven’t seen one in a magazine, and even though I rarely read magazines, I have seen a few watch ads in them. I don’t remember how I first encountered the brand.

I do have a print catalog of the product line, which Nomos sent me (for free) because I asked for it. They included a little moleskine-style notebook with the first few pages pre-filled with a description of the company’s in-house escapement, the beating heart of the movement and a part that many companies that claim to make an “in-house movement” are likely to source from somewhere else. That is brilliant marketing, but I had to ask them to send it to me.

I also have a book, given to me by a friend who acquired it when going through his own period of infatuation with Nomos some years ago, called “Nomos Glashütte – The Great Universal Encyclopaedia.” It is a thick, hardbound book with cloth covers, and is, as a subtitle suggests, “in Colour with an Impressive Map Section” (as well as an insert of stickers). It is the strangest amalgam of art and advertising that I have encountered. My friend ordered it directly from Nomos along with his product catalog (he had to pay for the book). A couple of hundred pages long, extensive photographs and diagrams. Some of it is about Nomos watches — specific models and movements — and some is more generally about mechanical watches and watchmaking, but most of it is something else. There is natural history, philosophy, politics, facts and figures related to the company and not. It could be a hero prop for a Wes Anderson movie set in a watch manufactory. If I had to assign it a single adjective, it would be “playful.”

An entry titled “Everything Arabic in and from Glashütte” discusses how “Arabic” numerals are considered to be “western” by Arabic peoples, as opposed to the truly Arabic system, which Arabs call “Indian.” The opposite page is a redacted copy of an e-mail order Nomos received in 2006 from a Polish company for 20,000 half-liter glass bottles, which they obviously could not fulfill. There is an entry about a tremendous flood that inundated Glashütte in 2002, the toll in damage and life and the subsequent baby boom nine months later. There is a star chart. There is an entry about the frustration of teaching a child to read a watch.

The entry for “Money” includes the following: “In general, money does not make people happy, but can help make unfortunate situations easier to bear in a relatively pleasant way. NOMOS watches also cost money. A lot at first sight: as much as a short vacation, a really good winter coat. Comparatively little, however, if one considers how much work goes into these watches.”

There is no entry for “Pandemic,” but otherwise, the Encylcopaedia seems quite comprehensive.

The Great Encyclopaedia creates a story about Nomos: what the company is about, who the people are that make it up. It succeeds in doing this with a perfectly balanced deployment of the direct and the oblique, pride and humility, humor and dry fact. The Nomos of the Encyclopaedia is plainly what I hope it to be: authentic, charming, refined, self-aware, morally balanced, capable. It's a story I might wish to believe about myself. The trick the Encyclopaedia pulls off is telling this story convincingly to an audience so jaded by a thousand other unsuccessful efforts to spin the same yarn. Please pay attention, says the Encyclopaeida, and you will see that we mean it.

Perhaps the Encyclopaedia’s most convincing argument is the simple fact of its irrational existence. It defies transactional calculus. No cost-benefit analysis, no strategy to maximize gain while minimizing expenditure, could possibly result in something like this. Hardly anyone will ever see it. Sure, a decade down the line you might impress some guy enough that he writes a blog post about it, and seven or even eight people might read that post, but that’s not going to recoup the effort and expense that must have gone into producing this artifact. Yet paradoxically, it’s this failure that transmutes the Encyclopaedia into the magical thing it seeks to be, the proof of its genuine nature that also makes it lethally effective branding.

One last thing that puts Nomos on the good guys’ team: they’ve publicly called out the rise of far-right hate in Germany, and have an internal program in place to combat it. This watch kills fascists! It probably works better in conjunction with a tire iron, but still.

Ah yes, we are here to review a watch. What shall I note that is not evident from the nicely done Nomos website? Well, the dial does not look white, despite what the official Nomos photos indicate. It is technically silver, made with a galvanizing process, and is almost impossible to photograph in a way that communicates its character, which changes dramatically with the light — it can look gray, or iridescent, or cream colored. It rewards careful study.

The knob-feel of the crown is excellent: firm, with satisfying resistance. The sound is pleasantly clicky, very different from the ETA 2824-2 in my last watch, which made a raspy hiss when hand-wound, albeit appealing in its own way.

My wrist is not large, and the standard strap is almost too long — I use the very first hole, which leaves quite a tail to tuck into the keeper. Nomos makes much of the strap being Horween Shell Cordovan leather, a horse product imported from Chicago, although it begins it existence on the hindquarters of charismatic quadrupeds in Texas. I am immediately suspicious when a material that I’ve never heard of is cited in marketing — for example, the Tangente case is made of 316L surgical steel, which sounds impressive unless you know that most decent watches are made of the same thing. Some research, though, indicates that this leather is indeed special — I just didn’t know enough about fancy shoes to be aware of it. It does seem like it will wear well. One thing to note — its color is not entirely resistant to the stomach acids of small children, which I discovered in the course of wearing it while being a father. Still, it’s nice, and Nomos sells replacements in different sizes and colors.

Is 35 mm too small a case for a real man? To answer that, I suppose you will need to judge if I am a real man. I believe I am at least fairly real — the imaginary part of me is not tremendously pronounced, and many people miss it entirely. And I am definitely a man, utterly boring in my cisgendering, and far too old, even by today’s standards, to be called a boy. I have never fought in a war or climbed a mountain, but there is time yet. The watch does not look small on me. If anything, I look small on the watch, despite standing over six feet tall when paying attention to my posture.

The main external difference between the 172 and the far more popular and widely documented 101/139 Tangente is the presence of a power reserve indicator giving you an idea of how much kick is left in the mainspring. It’s a patented Nomos design, and I really like it. Some people think that a power reserve on a handwound watch with a typical 40-ish hour mainspring makes no sense because you need to wind it every morning anyway. But some people think that Donald Trump is doing a great job of leading the United States through the pandemic, so some people can certainly be very wrong.

I have not yet read a review that clearly describes what this indicator does as it progresses through its stations, so let’s try here. It consists of two independently rotating disks. The top one has a cutout that reveals the disk below, which is painted partly red. As the mainspring winds down, both disks turn, rotating maybe half-a-dozen times over two days. But they turn at different rates, so the red slowly emerges from its hiding place. For a few hours in the morning, it remains entirely hidden from view, and I know the day has just begun, and anything is possible, I can do anything, as long as I do it inside my apartment because outside is virus hellscape zombieland. When you wind the watch, you can see the whole process happen like a time-lapse video in reverse.

This is actually my favorite part of the reserve indicator: I can see it turn while I wind the watch, and stop just short of fully tensioning the spring, when the red part of the indicator has just vanished. I never have to hit the spring’s hard stop. To be clear, this is for psychological reasons that may or may not suggest pathology. There’s nothing practically wrong with fully winding your watch.

I will take this moment to admit that while I appreciate watches and put a lot of thought into the search that led me to this one, I am not a true Watch Person. I seem prone to the occasional fit of watch frenzy — this is the second one I have suffered, or the third, depending on how you count — but in the years between them, I don’t read Hodinkee on the reg or go to Baselworld. But I did look at a lot of power reserve watches before selecting this one, and it has among the most elegant indicator designs I have seen. Many, most, look awkward and weird. There is one that is cooler, in which the “12” changes color, but the watch costs more than a nice car, and is made in such small volumes that I can’t even google my way back to what it was now; I will never forget her face, but her name eludes me.

On the inside, the 172 is based on the totally in-house DUW 4301 movement. The 101/139 contains Nomo’s Alpha movement, also made largely in-house but with a Swiss escapement. Those dirty, dirty Swiss. There is no difference in accuracy or anything like that. It’s a story element, but as I said, it’s all a story. I wonder if the DUW movements are in practice just Alphas that incorporate the in-house escapement – the layout appears identical. Do note if you’re shopping for used watches that the Tangente Gangreserve was also produced before Nomos graduated to its DUW movements — you can easily see the caliber labeling through the sapphire back, but if you’re just going by the dial view, I don’t think it’s possible to tell the difference.

“But does it tell time?” you want to know. It does. Although wildly inaccurate by quartz standards, my watch only drops about two seconds a day, which is quite good for a mechanical caliber. Under normal circumstances, I would rather it gained two seconds a day, but I’d also rather the world had shifted a bit of resources from stockpiling weapons to stockpiling N95 masks at some point in the last hundred years, yet here we are. You play the hand you’re dealt. And in these troubled times, my watch’s habit of slipping seconds is actually welcome. Although, in normal circumstances, I might check my watch to stay on schedule for the many time-sensitive obligations that an important person like myself must honor, in pandemic confinement as I am now, I mainly look at my watch to know: a) how long until I can begin to drink, and b) how long until I can put my children to bed. If these two pillars of my day gradually creep forward, so much the better.

Pandemic time is, generally speaking, best read from a wristwatch, because a watch is not a phone. There is nothing more feculent than the pocket Petri dish that masquerades as a cell phone — just looking at mine makes the skin on my fingers want to leap from my hands and flop around in some rubbing alcohol. In the best of times, these sordid slabs are teeming hot zones of E. coli, staph, Clostridium difficile and thousands of other nasties. But in pandemic times, the phone starts to feel even more menacing. Reading a wristwatch transfers zero pathogens to your precious bodily surfaces.

Also generically, a mechanical watch is a pleasant object to contemplate during a pandemic. It is by definition orderly, predictable, and clean. Its roots in history are reassuringly long and comforting to consider. It has a purity of purpose that flashes bright in the cold darkness of an indifferent universe. In the face of death, it says: “I will persist.” In every way it stands in opposition to a pandemic, which is by definition a total shitshow, a disordering of life from the micro to the macro level, a disaster compounded by human shortsightedness and buffoonery at every turn. Yes, there is heroism, and a nice dip in air pollution. But a pandemic is fundamentally the shrieking mouth of chaos, while a mechanical watch is a totem of order, its ticking a quiet song of promised continuance. You should also feel free to be a compassionate and useful member of your community, but let’s not overlook moments of watch-fancy as a tool for self development. The Dalai Lama has a Patek Phillipe. And you might argue that that is completely beside the point, and even though I might agree with you, I will not be listening.

The Tangente 172 is also specifically good for telling pandemic time. I find it soothing to look at, and right now soothing is something I can really use. The simple, no-nonsense design (Bauhaus! Deutscher Werkbund!), quite liberally inspired by a beautiful Lange watch from 1940. The pearlescent dial, which flashes almost rainbow in direct sunlight, which I try to experience as much as possible, albeit usually through windows. The needle-straight heat-blued hands (they look black in some lighting conditions, but their blue is really remarkable), so precise in their indication of the moment that you could almost read off the seconds without checking the small subdial. Looking at the watch gives me hope for humanity, for the simple beauty we can achieve and the complexity we can command to achieve it. If we made this thing just because it works so well and looks so nice doing it, surely we can solve more pressing problems, like getting masks and gloves to people who work in hospitals.

Of course, if in three months time I’m dragging my family through the twisted ruins of a civilization gone to seed, I’ll probably wish I’d opted for a Casio G-Shock. From that vantage point, would the Tangente be a bitter-sweet reminder of what was lost? A gleam of hope for what might be recovered? A mocking jab at misplaced faith in a world order that seemed so firm but proved so fleeting? I don’t know. But if I can make it across the border into Germany, I know where there’s a quiet village that might be a nice place to settle down. It’s supposed to be friendly, and it has weathered privations before. I already have a map.

A cynical enthusiast likely wondered if the 1 system wasn’t hobbled by design to protect Nikon’s DSLR sales. Remember DSLRs? Those big things that ordinary people who wanted a “real camera” to take to Rome or Paris were tricked into buying for years and years? There was a time, hard to countenance now, when the DSLR money train looked like it was it going to clack along forever, assuming you were too myopic to see the one-two punch of mirrorless and cell phones looming down the line. Sure, phones were already lopping the head off the consumer compact digicam market and lapping up the arterial spray . But people who wanted a real camera would always want a flipping mirror. Sony? Don’t they make TVs? If Nikon and Canon could agree on anything, it was that, and fuck the haters.

But maybe, as our confused world plowed into the second decade of the millennium, Nikon was having doubts. Maybe they saw the writing on the wall but misread it. And so, the 1 system. 

The Loneliest Number

I was far from the only person scratching their head. My feeling is that the commentariat was unimpressed, but that makes sense since the system wasn’t really aimed at people who talk about cameras. The J1 and V1 were considered together on DPreview and scored in the 60s, which is not great. The reviews got better as the system matured, but first impressions are hard to break. 

Fast focus is something any girl photographer can appreciate, since they need to take pictures of their fast moving children, which as we know is all females care about (incidently, DPreview said the V1 was good for “soccer moms,” their quotes. I guess the quotes made it OK?).

But what enthusiast will buy into a camera system with a handful of slow zooms and not much else? The lens I bought, the normal-equivalent 18.5mm f 1.8, wasn’t even available at launch. Nikon had the temerity to offer an expensive AF-enabled adapter to cobble its DSLR lenses to the 1 cameras, which all of seven people must have bought. It’s hard to imagine anyone but bird photographers thinking that a 2.7 crop factor would make adapted lenses useful.

So I pretty much forgot about the 1 system. It sputtered along for four years, culminating in the J5 in 2015. Contemporary reviews of the J5 were fairly positive, noting that the new BSI 20.1 megapixel sensor was actually up to scratch image quality-wise while still packing the blistering read-out speeds and whip-snap phase detect AF that first set the 1 system apart. Some reviewers wrote hopefully about an anticipated enthusiast-oriented V4, the presumed successor to 2014’s V3. Their hopes would have withered. As months and then years passed with no new announcements, it became obvious that Nikon had disowned its mini mirrorless offspring. “All dwarfs are bastards in their fathers’ eyes.” The company finally confirmed it in 2018. Not long after, it released a full frame mirrorless line, just like everyone else. Woohoo.

J is for Justifications

So why buy a J5 in 2019? I’ve been mainly shooting film for my “personal work” and using my phone (a Pixel, sometimes with a lens add-on that doubles the focal length to provide a normalish field of view) for the snaps that I take as the family chronicler. Thing is, lately I’ve been enjoying that chronicaling a bit too much to fit it into a phone. I wanted a real digital camera with a normal field of view and a sensor big enough to deliver good quality and a bit of subject separation for my kid pics. But it had to be small and light enough to fit in my man-purse along with a 35mm film camera, and ideally in a jacket pocket by itself, and it had to be relatively cheap. 

The list of contenders was surprisingly small. The Sony R100s are super-portable, but not cheap. Worse, their zooms slow down quickly as you leave the wide end, and in any case using a zoom to do a prime’s job is inelegant, not to mention that zooms lead to impure thoughts and moral decay. Ricoh’s GRs are interesting but too wide (and expensive). The Panasonic GM5 with the 20mm 1.7 or Olympus 25mm 1.8 mostly fits the bill, but it’s becoming expensive if you’re not an extremely patient auction watcher, and it has an assortment of other quirks mostly linked to its innovative stepper-motor micro-shutter (it DOES have a viewfinder, which is nice, but that makes its screen very small). And then my mind and my googling drifted to the 1 series. 

The J line might have started out as a point-and-shoot with interchangeable lenses, but by the J5’s time, things had changed. Nikon had introduced the entry-level S line, pushing the J up. So the J5 has a PASM dial (along with a bunch of inscrutable little pictures), two control wheels, a nub of a finger grip, and a flip-out screen (a big bonus for me, since I love TLR-style shooting as long as the image isn’t reversed). In other words, the J5 looks a lot like an enthusiast’s camera — it’s at least semi-enthusiastic. Maybe Nikon already knew that there’d be no V4 and positioned the J5 to have something for everyone. I was intrigued.

They must be dirt cheap, I figured, being unloved from birth and orphaned now. Not so much, I discovered — the J5, being last of the line, has held its value surprisingly well, and even the older models are still worth some scratch. I got a black J5 body in nice shape from a Japanese seller for $240. If you wait for an auction, you can do better. The 18.5mm 1.8 ran me $130 from a US seller. It rarely seems to come up for auction, and you’ll be hard-pressed to get one for much under a hunge. So, $370 all in. Not nothing, but I justified it because the value has presumably flattened out for a while — if we don’t get along, I can send it off without much of a loss.

Something Like a Review, Finally

That Aptina sensor that left me so nonplused in 2011 was actually a bit of a wonder. The first on-sensor phase detect autofocus at this scale, and they nailed it — focus was blazingly fast. Continuous shooting at 20 FPS with AF enabled, and an astounding 60 FPS with focus locked. I don’t recall it ever being mentioned in the marketing and I didn’t even realize it until I got my J5, but the J cameras have no mechanical shutter, so they’re perfectly silent (once you disable the fake shutter noise). It’s that electronic shutter that gets you up to 1/16,000 of a second (and limits you to a flash sync speed of 1/60 sec, but never mind — it was good enough for Leica).

That sensor/shutter actually has a big impact on how I shoot the J5: I use it like a phone. Cell phones are basically aperture priority cameras with a fixed aperture — the phone picks a shutter speed and ISO to get the job done. The J5’s lightning shutter lets it be used the same way, just without the suck of handling a slippery glass slab. I can shoot my 18.5mm lens wide open in full sun and not worry about overexposure, even with the J5’s base ISO of 160. That wouldn’t make sense for general photography, but for the kid pics that I’m doing, it’s almost always nice to have a little subject separation. Stopping action is good, too. 

Since I’ve turned off all the beeps and blurps, the J5 is effectively silent (the aperture and focus motor must make little clicks but they’re normally inaudible). This has obvious advantages in terms of not bothering my subjects, but it also gives me the feeling that I’m not really taking pictures as I repeatedly mash the shutter button. This sounds like a complaint, but it’s more liberating than anything else. Rationally, the J5 is not more frictionless than a digital camera with a conventional mechanical shutter, but it feels that way. When your “other camera” is loaded with film, the total separation of the act of photographing from the physical world can actually be relaxing. People often run this argument in reverse to justify the appeal of shooting film, but it works in both directions.

Insert Need For Speed Joke Here

You know the J5 is supposed to be fast. But is it really? Does it slam you into your seat? Does it make your cheeks ripple? Is it the blue meth, the mantis shrimp, the Amazon Prime of cameras? 

Well, the autofocus is pretty goddamn fast with the 18.5mm lens. It feels as close to instantaneous as any camera I’ve used. If you’re expecting it to be fast, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Unless you’re the kind of person who’s inevitably disappointed, in which case you should work on that. AF is also accurate, which is nice. It’s so fast that the J5 thinks it can get away with not taking a photo if it hasn’t locked focus in AF-S mode. I disagree, but apparently adding menu options is expensive in the imaginary world where the 1 system was a roaring success.

And the burstastic burst mode? It bursts, no doubt about it. You know that movie trope where a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing fires a machine gun and it jerks wildly in his hands and ends up stitching the ceiling with a dozen holes before he can get his finger off the trigger? That’s what the J5’s continuous drive feels like. You really can’t squeeze off less than three or four frames, and if you lean on it you’ll fill the buffer with nearly-identical shots in no time. I think it’s a neat thing to have and there are probably some use cases where it’s invaluable, but for me personally, the work involved in whittling down the extravaganza of files it kicks out is rarely worth the upside.

I guess I should also mention the J5’s best shot feature now, which purports to continually buffer 20 images and then picks the best recent one when you press the shutter. I’m sure you can think of a thousand reasons why this shouldn’t work, and in my limited messing around with it I haven’t found much that would refute you. My guess is that if you’re shooting a group it will try to pick a shot where everyone’s eyes are open, but I haven’t put that to the test. 

The rest of the camera is mostly normal, speed-wise. Average start-up, normally responsive. There is one strangely sluggish behavior: if you have image review on (that is, the screen automatically shows the photo you just took), there’s a lag between shooting and when the image flashes onto the screen. It’s way too long, but since I leave image review off anyway, this doesn’t bother me. (I’ve seen complaints about slow shot-to-shot times in reviews, but I think it’s really this pinch point that’s bothering people — the camera can take pictures about as fast as you can mash the button).   

Image Quantity

Let me address the fear many potential J5 buyers will have: is a 1-inch sensor big enough to capture the vast scope of my creative vision? Will this relatively paltry slab of silicon be able to grab enough photons to transmute my artistic will into eye-slashing files? Is it large enough to assuage long-standing doubts of self-worth? Everyone must answer that last one on their own, but on the first two counts you needn’t worry. 

The 20.1 megapixel backside-illuminated sensor is not appreciably noisier than a good Micro Four Thirds sensor of similar vintage. Its dynamic range has tested at over 12 stops, and I see nothing in practice to make me doubt it. It’s a fine little sensor.  If you want exhaustive image quality details, go back to some of the contemporary reviews (but don’t start at DPreview, which passed on the camera — maybe they smelled the stink of death on it). It’s my humble opinion that from around 2014 on, most sensors were pretty damn good. Sufficient, let’s say. Within any given format, “sensor quality” starts to take a backseat to other considerations for all but the most basement-bound measurebator. The J5’s sensor supports that world view. I have no problem with it at normal ISOs, and while detail suffers as you climb through four-digit ISO territory, I find that with the 18.5mm 1.8, you can take a technically satisfying picture under most any lighting condition in which you’re likely to find humans living their lives. I just leave ISO set to automatic and capped at 6400, and don’t much think about it. Noise is nicely fine-grained and even.

The more ineffable qualities of the image are fine for me too. Color is good. The automatic white balance is too cool in the shade for my taste, but this is the case with every digital camera I’ve ever used. I typically leave WB set to cloudy or shade when outside, and use auto when I’m under artificial lighting (it does a good enough job with that). 

There’s apparently no antialiasing filter, but I don’t notice a big difference, either on the upside (sharpness) or the down (moire). I’m a bit suspicious of the practice of nixing AA filters because it feels like gaming a benchmark, but whatevs.

Gripes

One gripe I have is that the J5 tends to underexpose when there are bright parts in a scene. Yes, this is better than overexposing, but it seems like a silly problem to have in this day and age. If there’s a bright window in the background, get ready to spin up the exposure compensation. I notice this tendency in both matrix and center-weighted modes. The spot meter is kind of useless outside of manual mode since you can’t lock exposure and focus separately. 

On a related note, the Face Priority feature does a good job of finding peoples’ mugs and locking focus (without too many false alarms), but strangely, the camera doesn’t seem to bias exposure towards the faces. Got two faces smiling right into the lens with a bright window between them? Get ready for a nicely exposed picture of what’s outside, with some shadows flanking it.

Another thing. On paper the J5 has dual control wheels. Yay! But in practice it has one (1) very nice control wheel on the top plate, with a broad ridged surface and satisfying knob feel, and one (1) kind-of-crappy little dink-ass wheel on the back surrounding the OK button. One controls shutter speed, one controls aperture. Which one is assigned to aperture, making it one of the most important controls for an aperture priority shooter like myself? The wrong one. Can you swap them? No.

This problem is emblematic of the J5’s UI as whole, which feels a lot less flexible than I’m used to on an enthusiast-targeted camera. You have minimal control of what’s displayed on the screen in shooting mode, for example. There are two settings: the “high” setting buries the preview image in mostly irrelevant icons, while the “low” setting still eats up a lot of edge.

Let me digress for a second and get something off my chest. I think ALL digital cameras should offer the option of seeing a preview image with no information overlays. I find that I really have to think about including what’s under that transparency in the composition, especially when using a poorly visible screen in bright light. 

Other stuff you can’t do that I wish you could: go between zoomed-in images in review mode without zooming out. Toggle info levels without deep diving into the menu system. Repurpose the useless wireless button. Lock exposure without locking focus.

What About That Lens?

I like the Nikkor 18.5mm 1.8. It’s your basic moderately fast normal, kind of hard to screw up I suppose. It’s sharp from wide open. It only flares if you savagely provoke it, and even then veiling glare is pretty minimal. I haven’t noticed any vignetting. Focus is silent. As far as optics goes, you can basically ignore it.

But nothing cheap is perfect except for french fries. The lens has a marked potential for purple fringing, which can be pretty intense on high-contrast edges when wide open. I think the J5 tries to hide this in post, but occasionally some slips by. There’s presumably not a ton of ED glass in this low-cost, lightweight lens, which probably explains the less-than-total longitudinal chromatic aberration correction. And if I could shoot fancier lenses wide-open in full sun at 1/16,000 sec, they might get fringe-y too.

The other thing is bokeh. I’ve tried pretty hard not to become a connoisseur of bokeh because I mostly believe that any photograph that depends on the quality of out of focus areas for impact is probably artistically bankrupt. But I do use shallow depth of field in my family “documentary” photos to keep attention on the main subject, and then I find myself looking at the blurry bits, and it’s nice if they don’t stand out or look funky. Unfortunately, this lens’ bokeh tends to be pretty busy and jittery. It’s not hideous, but it’s far from great. Anyway, I can live with it.

Should I Buy a J5?

If you’ve wandered in here by mistake looking for a generally good compact system camera, then the answer is “NO.” If you aim to invest in a variety of lenses, nope. If you’re a normal person, basically, no.

But if you found this review at all it probably means you’re a bit of a weirdo, and if you’re weird in a very specific way, then you should seriously consider the J5 and its 18.5mm normal lens.

If you want just about the smallest, lightest camera with a larger-than-campact sensor and a fast normal lens that won’t break the bank, then the J5, a four-year-old camera from a failed system, merits a serious look. If you take a perverse pleasure in making contrarian consumer choices, all the better. Also consider the Panasonic GM5 and Olympus EP-M2, especially if you might want to expand your lens collection beyond that fast normal.

Besides the above-mentioned qualities these cameras all share one other thing: they’re positively geriatric in digital terms. At some point camera makers decided that people wanted bigger, not smaller. If you want something that’s both small and capable, you are part of an underserved minority. The market has cut you off. The market is roiling with full-frame cameras, with 50mm f 1.4 lenses that weigh more than your head. Even Micro Four Thirds bodies have been bloating. They’re still the best option for most people who want an ILC system, but they’re bigger than they need to be. 

The camera market is no longer interested in most people, because most people aren’t interested in cameras. They have a phone that does that. (If you want a long-form mulling-over of where the camera market is going make sure to check out this post. And congratulations, you’re part of an even smaller underserved minority). The not-most people who have convinced themselves they need a real camera have shown a strange willingness to pay enormous premiums for enormous hardware. And camera makers don’t do what makes sense, photography-wise — they do what pumps up the margins in a shrinking market. 

So here we are, you and I. Small camera weirdos. Good luck. Let me know if you dig up something interesting that fits the bill.

Then the OM40 happened (AKA the OM-PC in the States, and for whatever reason, the OM-40 all over the Internet). Presumably someone at Olympus looked at the Canon T70 or some other plastic-age wonder, threw up in their mouth a little, and then muttered to themselves, “Well, I guess this is what we’re doing now.” So they took the sleek metal beauty of an OM camera and wrapped it in a thick coat of rubber that wordlessly shrieks “THE NINETEEN EIGHTIES ARE HERE TO RUIN THINGS.”

On the front right of the camera, the rubber rises up to form a fingergrip, admitted useful but lumpen and mostly smooth so as to best show off your skin oils. It probably looked better in a line drawing. On the left of the camera, the rubber is smooth as the wax cheek of a figure in one of those medieval torture museums, the better to attract all manner of smear and scratch. Around the back on the film door, there’s a gentle rise of thumb-rest on the right patterned with small squares and more of that same, corpse-like slick of black rubber.

It’s not just the rubber. The OM40 hunches its shoulders as if ashamed. Nearly all SLRs have a shape dictated by the path of the film and the presence of the prism used to bounce light into the photographer’s eye: a “prism hump” flanked by two roughly symmetrical planes bearing the most important controls. But the OM40 permanently cowers after its beating with the ugly stick, the prism hump sunk down between its uneven shoulders – the right-most control dial, which sets ISO and exposure compensation, sits nearly level with the top of the prism hump. On the left side of the mount, just below the hump, a small knob protrudes like a bolt from the neck of Frankenstein’s monster. It’s offset on the other side of the mount by a large red self-timer light.

The rubber does not generally age well, developing a white exudate as it slowly reverts to its component petroleum parts. You can kind of clean it off with some patience, and at least it doesn’t feel too sticky, but yuck.

Beauty is strange. Science says that all things being equal, we perceive beautiful people as smarter, nicer, and generally superior to less-beautiful people. This feels in line with the way the world seems to work, but at odds with the way I experience other people. I tend to be suspicious of exceedingly beautiful people, dubious that their accomplishments are truly their own. I struggle to grant them full human agency (with the exception of my exceeding beautiful wife and children, who confront me with the violent fact of their agency every day).

Beauty in objects, particularly functional objects, is simpler and harder to fault. Why a beautiful camera? Well, why the hell not?

Anyway, my OM40 turned out to have a fault beyond its appearance: a slippery film transport that resulted in overlapping frames. So, no samples with this review except this one:

But it seems that mine is a one-off, and apart from internet mutterings about the electronics failing, which honestly could come down to one guy on a forum with a chip on his shoulder ten years ago, people don’t complain much about the OM40, or indeed, talk about it much at all (these guys excepted). My one practical gripe about it is that its height makes it hard to palm. I like to carry a small SLR or rangefinder in one hand (with a wrist strap for backup), with the top snugged into my palm and fingers curling around underneath, the lens facing in towards my leg. Although it’s generally small, the OM40’s strange tallness makes this grip uncomfortable.

Apart from that, in use, it’s usually fine and occasionally better. The viewfinder is larger, with more coverage, than many cameras in its class. The tactility of its electronic controls is acceptable. Wind-on is a little janky, with a distinctly two-stage feel as the stroke advances the film and then cocks the shutter, but maybe that’s partly down to my syphilitic sample. I like the shutter speed ring around the lens mount, an OM hallmark that seems like it should have been widely copied but wasn’t. There’s a rudimentary form of evaluative metering that’s supposed to be quite good, but with negative film, who really cares? Maybe this is one to try your fresh Ektachrome with – you can buy an OM40 body for less than a roll of that sweet transparency stuff.

The MX, introduced in 1976, appears to be a direct answer to Olympus's OM-1 of 1972, which set a high (or low) bar for compact SLRs. Until Olympus shook things up, Pentax's Spotmatics were considered small and light, but still tipped the scales at over 600 grams, with heavy lenses to boot. The MX undercuts the OM-1 by 15 grams, which gives it bragging rights but not much practical advantage. I went with it more because I like the lenses, which seem to be more robustly made than their Olympus OM equivalents, though they don't feel as nice as Pentax's ridiculously luxy screwmount optics.  

There are many 35mm SLRs that are smaller and lighter than the Pentax MX, but they came later, as electronics replaced mechanics and plastic displaced metal. Many of those cameras are probably better, objectively speaking: electronically controlled shutters are more accurate than their clockwork predecessors, and well-made plastic bodies can resist impact better than metal ones. For example, the MX's prism hump is an alloy eggshell that crumples at the slightest provocation: peruse listings on eBay if you don't believe me (happily, this doesn't usually seem to affect the camera's function). 

But if you've found this post, you probably understand that metal is better than plastic, even when it isn't. And mechanical cameras can be fixed forever, while dead integrated circuits are forever dead. (The MX does have an electronic light meter, but if it fails it just makes the camera more like an old Leica). So if you're a romantic with a bad back, if you're a lazy lover of physical intricacy, look no further than the Pentax MX.  

1. The Film Look

Well, yes, but no. I do like the film look, but that’s not reason enough to endure the trials of shooting film. Can you really tell the difference between a digitally captured image that’s been skillfully processed to look like a film scan and something that started on emulsion? I’m sure some folks out there can, just as I believe that some people can hear the difference between vinyl and CD audio. I’m generally fine with MP3s.

But the thing for me is I only like the film look if it’s arrived at through film. Otherwise I just feel silly. And here we get into authenticity: the uncut cocaine, the fresh-dug truffle, the 1980s American dollar in an imploding banana republic of our cultural moment.

So it seems what I’m really after is the authentic. Is the image seared into emulsion more authentic than the one that’s read off a sensor? What if you digitally scan that emulsion to see what’s on it? What if you slap some curves on the result to get the tonality you want? Just shut up and let me enjoy my film.

2. Film is Cool (or Hip, or Whatever)

I’ve never been cool and have no intention of changing that. I’m married and out of the mate selection game. There are relatively few people I care to impress, and none of those could be impressed by my taking pictures on film. Film may well be cool, but I don’t care.

3. Film is Forever

Some people worry about bit rot, orphaned media, electromagnetic pulses, abandoned file formats, lost-to-the-grave passwords and other technical problems that, they imagine, will prevent future generations from accessing their trove of would-be immortal images. A film negative is sometimes held up as the solution: a physical thing firmly attached to reality, supposedly safe from the ravages of time. I don’t know. Maybe. But you’d have to have some damn curious great-grand kids if you expect them to do anything with that binder of negs they find in the attic in 2100. It’s hard enough to read film now, when you can buy a film scanner new on the internet. Don’t even talk about enlargers and the associated papers and chemistry. Our great-grand children will, unfortunately, have a few more pressing issues to deal with than looking at our photographs. If you really care about sending photos into the future, shoot however you want and then print up a quality book on acid-free paper. Maybe include “DO NOT DISCARD” on the cover and spine. In a few different languages.

4. Film is Cheap

You may laugh, but I’ve seen the argument that film is cheap compared to digital. This involves building a straw man of fantastically expensive digital bodies and the assumption that you have to get a new camera every couple of years. With the right accounting gymnastics you can almost make this work, but for normal people using consumer-grade gear for a reasonable amount of time and taking a reasonable (by contemporary standards) number of pictures, shooting film is more expensive than shooting digital and that’s that. I include this not because it’s a widely held belief, but because it speaks for the attractions of film that people are willing to contort their thinking so creatively in an effort to justify something they want to do even when it doesn’t make sense.

5. This Film Kills Computers

People claim that shooting film frees them from their computers. No post-processing! This has not been my experience. I scan my film, like, I suspect, the great majority of my contemporaries. Then I almost always have to tweak the scans. Not too much (authenticity!) but a bit. On the other hand, I can select, edit, and tag a week’s worth of digital photos on my tablet, from the comfort of my couch, in a fraction of the time. Without the blood-pressure-spiking hassle of getting neg strips lined up in the carrier *.

6. Film Smells Good

I’ve seen this offered as a good reason to shoot film and… actually, yeah, it does. The smell of a freshly opened canister is a fine reason to shoot film, though this might only work for people old enough to have that chemical odor tied into the lizard-brain memories of their happy Kodak-tinted childhoods. Every time I pop the top, I awaken my 8-year-old self, tearing open the foil on a 110 cartridge.

* I mostly wrote this before I got a scanner that eats a whole roll of 35mm in one go, so now I find #5 to be mostly true. The reason I've hesitated to post the piece for a while is because I'm not totally sure about #1. How important is the look for me? Can I tell film film from from digital film? How long do I have to look in the mirror to satisfy your demands for self-knowledge? Leave me be. 

In 2018 it’s hard to recall that once, most blogs were about nothing, the neuronal noise of brains suddenly connected to a global network. That rambling impulse is now expended on Facebook and the like, precious seed spilled on poisoned ground. Today a blog must be about one thing. The penalty for straying out of niche is flogging with thorned branches. According to what law, you demand? The law, of course.

But Pomeroy flaunts the law. Though it seems that at first, he toed the line. He’s written a lot about old cameras and expired film. The first post on Women and Dreams, dating from 2009, is about the Nikon D1x, a digital camera that was dead and buried when Pomeroy published nearly 6,000 words about it. The piece goes deep into the camera as a historical object, its context and position in the flow of technology. It’s well written. There are hints of what’s to come, but what most sets it apart is the depth of attention focused on a camera that most people wouldn’t care about. If Pomeroy continued in this vein, I’d be impressed but not rapturous.

But as the blog goes on, something besides meticulous research creeps into Pomeroy’s camera reviews. In his review of the Olympus OM-1, he writes, “During the 1950s and 1960s Olympus had been a lone wolf hunting away from the pack, its mouth stained with the flesh of its prey as it dove through banks of snow, driven by a satanic lust for warm blood; it had long since filled its belly, now it hunted in a futile quest to discharge the mounting howl of rage that swelled within its hot black heart.” A sentence later, Pomeroy is back into a more trenchant but less fun analysis of what Olympus was up to. But the digression sets a tone: you’re not sure what’s coming next, and its perverse humor flavors writing that might otherwise read straighter.  

Still later, Pomeroy moves beyond brief digressions. His review of the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S lens opens with the line, “Wesley Willis had names for his demons.” He goes on to discuss what Pac-Man’s psychology and the psychology of the few men who have achieved perfect scores playing Pac-Man have in common, then systems analysis, the modeling of human society, Katy Perry’s wardrobe choices, and Hitler and Stalin’s efforts to forcibly mold social systems. He writes over 1,600 words before mentioning the lens, and when he finally introduces it, we see his trademark style of violent non sequitur:

“Hitler cared only for the good of his tribe. But the great machine of humanity has its own course, and cares not for individual tribes; its ultimate destination is unknowable and perhaps not to our satisfaction. We may not recognise it when we arrive. Perhaps the program has already run its course, and we are simply swarf left to blow away in the wind, patients left forgotten in the waiting room of a dental practice that shut half an hour ago. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S.”

Pomeroy stays with old cameras, old lenses, until 2011, when he takes on a video game called Manic Miner. This piece is actually a capsule history of the British video games industry in the 1980s. It’s great.  More camera stuff follows, but then you get a post about Fermat’s theorem and a Paul Simon song.

Pomeroy compels me. I learned about him from a friend, word of mouth. In a small restaurant in Paris run by an old man who fled persecution in Vietnam to start a new life among his former colonizers. The air in this restaurant is often thick with those tiny flies that are attracted to fruit and wine, fermenting things, just as a typical Pomeroy post is thick with ideas, digressions, surreal asides. Restaurants without flies are not completely beyond my means, but I like this one because I’m cheap and it has lots of atmosphere. 

I’ve spent some time trying to find the perfect entry point, the post that will give you the flavor I want you to taste, but this is surprisingly difficult. Women and Dreams works as a cumulative experience. The edifice that Pomeroy has built must be lived in to be fully appreciated - it’s not enough to quickly tour a few rooms. 

So start anywhere. Read a few thousand words about ambient music or The Beatles, a classic film, a long-dead lineage of cameras, an old laptop, or a video game. I haven’t really played a video game since the mid 90s, and even then I was a dilettante, but I like Pomeroy’s game reviews. Like New Yorker reviews of books I’ve never read and will never read, but would like to know about. 

The only times Pomeroy’s really lost me are some particularly deep dives into music. What music do I like? The grumble of history breaking up in the past like a glacier calving into an endless sea of forgetting. And Lorde, obviously.

But if you’re not just going to dive in, if you expect me, the reviewer, to do my job, fine. Here’s Pomeroy on the city he often documents:

“Me and London. London matters. Because every genius needs something to feed his mind, and London has a lot of things to look at and think about. And eat, too. It has shops as well. An integrated transport network. Staggeringly expensive houses, filled with people who are not there.”

Pomeroy is angry about London’s transformation into a storage vessel for global capital (a recurring theme for him) in a way that’s not fashionable today. We are supposed to be measured, or we are frothing fundamentalists. Pomeroy is neither, which is refreshing.

His movie reviews are majestic. He writes not just about the film, but about the making of the film, the perceptions of contemporary audiences (when reviewing older movies, which he does often), the film’s place in the sweep of cinema history. And he writes things like this:

“In my mind Star Wars and Empire belong to the world of myth and legend whereas Return of the Jedi belongs to a world where it rains on Sunday and cats die and life consists of stupid people hitting each other.”

I’ve mentioned his digressions. Many of the best are stand-alone bits of flash fiction (or non-fiction). I’m confident that no other review of the Sony PlayStation 3 game console addresses this issue:

“A few years ago Pathé News uploaded its archive to YouTube, but most of the clips only have a few hundred views, probably from bots. Occasionally the robonews that passes for internet journalism digs out one of the clips and there's a brief flurry of interest but otherwise Pathé's archives are trapped in a kind of eternal living death. We dream about people and things that are lost to us because the mystery is intriguing, but while the dead sleep the taste of the living moves on and the past becomes small.”

I’m just going to keep going. Pomeroy’s not a big Leica guy, but he does write a little about the R system. Consider this, from his review of the R8. Many camera reviewers include a snippet of the maker’s history. Pomeroy is no exception, but he’s exceptional:

“Leica was founded in 1849 and has survived a period of human history that killed millions and obliterated empires, that saw the conquest of space and of the atom - and, as a consequence, the possible end of human civilisaton and all multi-cellular life on Earth. In Leica's time we realised that death is the end, that the stars are beyond us, that there are limits to our reach, and that without restraint we would kill ourselves and everything we wanted to keep.”

He hasn’t reviewed a Leica M camera, but he addresses the system in his R8 review with characteristic flair.

“Leica is most often associated with its famous, long-running line of rangefinder cameras, which are popular with fat rich Swiss people, rich Chinese people, rich Russians. In the grim future of Frank Herbert's Dune, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen will own a Leica. With his fat fingers sliding over the controls he will use it to photograph the bodies of all the boys he strangled, so that he can look at the pictures and imagine what it must be like to be dead.”

No one could have said it better, no one else could have said it. I still pretend I’m Henri Cartier-Bresson when I fondle my M2, but in my darker moments the Baron now intrudes on the fantasy.

Let’s stop with the specifics and return to generalities. You might find just about anything in a Pomeroy post, but a few blog-standards are missing: typos, sloppy language, unpolished thought, lazy fact handling. Outside of the better professional outlets, it’s difficult to imagine any substantial body of text online in 2018 that doesn’t lean into these elements, but here it is, a unicorn that can only be made mortal by the touch of Mia Sara’s hand. 

But it’s not just good writing. It’s strange. It rambles in the most engaging way. It is manifestly not for everyone, and the fact that I like it makes me feel special. I want everyone to know about it, but I don’t want everyone to get it. Not that there’s any danger of Pomeroy becoming mainstream, not in this world, nor any of the worlds adjacent to us. As near as I can tell, very few people benefit from the astounding effort he puts into his writing. The Twittersphere doesn’t erupt when he drops a new post. Apart from the friend who originally introduced me to him I’ve never come across anyone online or off who knows of him, any reference to the blog.

That is why I’m writing this, I suppose. If Pomeroy had a million Instagram followers, I wouldn’t bother. His stuff is great, but what also seduces me is the idea of a man pouring this effort into the void of an indifferent universe. I must read his work in that context, and it moves me. It is proof of purity. No art exists in a vacuum: everything has a social context. The Mona Lisa has actually been obliterated by its context, even though it's hanging right there in the Louvre -- it is a thing seen so much it has become impossible to see. When Khloé Kardashian posts a selfie on Instagram, she knows she is doing it for 76 million people, and the million-odd people who “like” it know they are among those millions. I’m trying to say that sometimes the world makes me want to scream, and other times it actually does make me scream, into a pillow, so as not to disturb the neighbors, but there are still many good things in it, and many things more terrible than vapid celebrity.  

I’ve toyed with the idea that Pomeroy doesn’t care if people read him or not, but I’ve had to discard the notion – there are hints, here and there, that he’s open to expanding his audience. A Twitter account, a few forum posts linking back to his pieces, links to the site in old bios. Comments are disabled on Women and Dreams – is it because he can’t be bothered to moderate the incoherent railings of mouth-breathers, or because he likes the mystique of appearing not to care about generating "social engagement" around his writing, or because he doesn’t like to see a 5,000-word-post with 0 comments any more than the next guy?

The site itself, hosted on Blogger, seems designed to blend into the background noise of the internet. But Pomeroy isn’t technologically naïve. This is a guy who installs Linux on old PCs for shits and giggles. I think he chose Blogger rather than something hipper because he expects it to be around for a long time. Google (which owns Blogger) is the Great Archiver. The company keeps Usenet posts from the 80s preserved in amber. Perhaps Pomeroy just wants to make sure his words remain accessible. Sometimes he wrestles with this theme explicitly. In a post that opens with a meditation on a photograph of Audrey Hepburn, he writes:

“Ostensibly this blog is about photography, although in practice I find it hard to stay focused on one thing and there is only so much to say about photography. The equipment doesn't move me any more; it's the art I care about, specifically the topic that drives all art. The desire to live beyond death.”

It's an unusually earnest tone for Pomeroy, who most often uses hyperbole and semi-fiction to communicate his deeper truths. 

I’ve also considered the possibility that there actually is a modestly large readership for the site -- not Kardashian-large, but, say, tier-two-literary-fiction large -- but that like me, those people don’t mention much of anything on Twitter. They might be telling their friends about it in restaurants and bars, in back alleys and shallow cave networks, rather than on Facebook. This is my preferred version of reality, and where it doesn’t exist, I seek to make it. The end.

P.S.

Although Women and Dreams seems to be the focus of Pomeroy's current efforts, he's left other noteworthy evidence of his passage. Most interesting is his contribution of articles to Everything2, a kind of Wikipedia-meets-Urban-Dictionary-meets-LiveJournal that apparently flourished around the turn of the millennium. I had never heard of it and only encountered it in the context of stalking Pomeroy across the internet. Reading his pieces there, I realized that the weirdness that grows in Women and Dreams was actually there from the start -- he was just reining it in. He’s also apparently a prolific Wikipedia editor, though there his effort is subsumed into the hive mind. He also co-wrote two printed books. I’ve read one, a tiny collection of illustrated absurdist wit, but the other appears be wholly unavailable. And he's written entertaining reviews on Amazon, though they seem to be tapering off of late.

The dichotomy that sets the purity of film photography against the artifice of digital capture overlooks the fact that vision itself is a tremendously elaborate and notoriously unreliable example of computational imaging. What we “see” is disturbingly detached from the photons that hit our retinas (retinae?). It's dependent on the way our brains put together flickering nerve impulses as the eyeball saccades around the scene and melds multiple moments with preconceived schemas to form an illusion of continuous, coherent vision.

Consider the classic Harvard study in which subjects watched a video of people passing balls around. As they carefully tracked a ball, half the participants failed to notice the man in a gorilla suit who sauntered across the screen. So much for the reliable fidelity of our built-in cameras.

So the human eye is more an eye-Phone than a classic L-eye-ca (oh yes, I did that). But maybe it's film's divergence from the eye rather than any parallels that justifies our attachment to the impractical and antiquated. Human vision is complex and unreliable. Much like a smartphone, much like the world. And digital photography, which is as much about computers as optics, suffers from the fundamental opacity common to so much modern technology: nobody understands it.

No single body, I mean. As a product of humans, of course “we” understand it. But consider the thousands of minds, the millions of lines of proprietary code, that go into a smartphone. Could any one human really know, end to end, how the thing works? Of course, most people (myself included) don’t fully understand all the optical principles of a multi-element lens or the chemistry of light-sensitive emulsion, but we intuit that with some reading, a substantial but totally human amount of effort, we could. And this lets us feel more in tune with the technology, more aligned with it as we use it. It’s a tool, like a sharp stick, not magic. Magic, despite its appeal, has a dark side. They burned witches, you know. And they burned David Copperfield. Or if they haven’t yet, David, you better watch your back.

Perhaps it's digital technology's transformation into a subjective, active partner in image making that's freshened analog photography's appeal. Digital, having largely achieved the goal of total fidelity that photography has aspired to since its inception, is now trying to out-think us. We want what we remember, or wish we remembered, whether it was there or not. This is how human vision and memory already work, after all -- the perpetual golden hour light of childhood afternoons half-cribbed from old movies, the moment when everyone laughed that never actually happened.

And to some extent, this is what all photography does. The moment of family bliss caught in the frame is what carries forward across the years: the sulking and hair-pulling that bracketed it are allowed to fade. But film, when you understand it, feels more dutiful, more reliable, perhaps more beautiful, with its opto-mechano-chemical process that affords no judgement in the moment. Once the shutter is tripped, a chain of events rooted in the physical world leads to an image hiding in the film emulsion, waiting for developer. It's magic, but it's a small, predictable magic. Nothing you're likely to burn for.    

In this first of a series of posts about the awesomeness of film photography that I’m calling “On Film,” I will explore how shooting film protects (albeit transiently) the photographer from the burden of failing, again and again, to capture the vision he or she reached for in releasing the shutter.

Now, there’s a related but different element of shooting film that’s already been thoroughly mapped out by those few folks who delve into such things on the web: delaying gratification. The idea is that film photography thwarts the instant gratification underlying the appeal of so many things digital. Digital chimping vs the languorous wait to develop film. Although it’s worth noting that the most commercially successful form of film photography of the millennium has the morpheme “insta” right in it and only makes you wait for a few minutes to see your image, let’s ignore that for the moment. The consensus among film shooters is that delayed gratification is part of the fun, and I agree.

But this understanding of delay elides (in a way that’s very symptomatic of our moment) the fact that film also delays something else: disappointment. I don’t think I’m breaking confessional barriers when I reveal that my own photographs often disappoint me. They not infrequently fail to convey the emotion or thought I intended when I tripped the shutter. With digital, this brutal truth is immediately accessible, and even though I leave instant review turned off I can’t always resist a peek. There, scant seconds after taking the picture, everything still in working memory, I must confront failure. Failure deserves its own time. It should be considered in private, like (and possibly with) a glass of nice whisky. It shouldn’t interfere with the moment of seeing, of experiencing. Film enforces this separation.

Of course, there are happy surprises after development. All of life is not pain, no matter what those emo kids say. Gratification, however fleeting, is possible. But in the real world, there is also failure of vision, technical error, and always the slap of fickle chance. To review a roll of film is to discover all of this with our attention whole, not chopped up and ground into the flow of experience like so much sausage. And that is something good about film.

Now, some people swear by flatbed scanners, especially the Epsons, but that still involves film carriers and several passes to do a whole roll. Plus, I don’t have a permanent place to set up a scanner – I pack it away between uses, so size is a factor.

My dream, and here I admit to a notable lack of ambition if not vision, was something that would just suck a whole uncut roll of 35mm through at a go. Something like a Pakon 135, but a lot cheaper and more recently in production. I’d come across the Pacific Image / Reflecta models in my research, but remained unconvinced. People complain bitterly about them in the few user reviews that are available. They aren’t hideously expensive, buy they’re too expensive to take a flyer on.

Then, one fine day, Amazon suggested I buy a Pacific Image PrimeFilm 7250Pro3 (or Pro 3, or Pro3 – nice job, marketing -- alias Reflecta RPS 7200 in the old world), not for the $400 or so I remember it selling for, but for a mere $170 (as I write this a few months later, it remains on Amazon US at that price; if you're reading this in the distant future, perhaps as part of a university course about the most influential digital publications of the early millennium, or even just a few months from now, it'll probably be gone) . By then, I’d been suffering with the OpticFilm breadbox for long enough. I took a chance. And I do not regret it. If that’s all you want to know, you can stop reading now. Peace be with you.

What is Pacific Image? The company is Taiwanese, with an American beachhead in Torrance, California. Unlike Epson, Canon, and (in the time before) Nikon, it is not an imaging powerhouse or a household name. There’s something charmingly amateurish about its English-language website, which lives at “scanace.com.” The website, as well as the product packaging and documentation, suggest there’s not a big budget for marketing or visual design. The English translations are passable.

But Pacific Image is the only company making a consumer product that can scan a whole roll of 35mm film at a go. Which is amazing, when you think about it. Or not. Perhaps the problem with film scanner production is akin to the problem with film production itself. It’s not that there’s not enough demand to sell film profitably. Consider Ilford, happily cranking along all these years, with only black and white emulsions. Consider Astrum (Svema). The resuscitation of Film Ferrania. The problem isn’t that film can’t be made profitably – it’s that it can’t be made profitably at the scale that Kodak, Fujifilm and the various former big players used to do it. When Fuji kills an emulsion, it’s not because nobody wanted it – it’s because not enough people wanted it to make running an enormous production line economically feasible. That “not enough” might still be a lot of people, and someone who’s set up to for lower-capacity production can meet that demand profitably.

Similarly, maybe Epson can’t afford to pour the R & D into a dedicated 35mm film scanner that would sell quite a few units in the absolute, yet nothing at all relative to the volumes at which multinational conglomerates operate. But making a good scanner is frickin’ hard, which keeps Joe-Blow Kickstarter from just whipping one up for a couple thousand backers. So that leaves us with Pacific Imaging, which, like Ilford, somehow ended up in the goldilocks spot to meet current demand.  

So, I bought a scanner from Goldilocks. She has a pentagram inked on the back of her left hand these days, you know. Her sinister hand. All grown up. How time flies. The PrimeFilm 7250Pro3 is not perfect, but it’s not as bad as the user reviews would have you believe. I think I know why.

Firstly, many people’s woes are tied to the included CyberViewX software. The name and the UI design harken back to the days when PCs were commonplace but a camera was assumed to require film. The program is not that old, but looking at the dates of the reviews and the number of revisions the software has undergone, it seems that Pacific Image has straightened it out quite a bit since the scanner was introduced. And apart from being plug ugly, there’s not much to complain about. If you’re familiar with the basic concepts of film scanning, you can almost use it without reading the instructions. And if you have any experience with scanning software, you know that’s not a trivial achievement.

And that leads to the second reason people bitch and moan, which is that you can’t unpack a film scanner and expect it to work like a toaster. A typical user review goes something like this: “I bought this to scan a suitcase of negatives I found in my uncle’s basement, and it didn’t work right.” Under the best of circumstances, these things are complicated. Pacific Imaging is selling specialized, niche products to ordinary people who are used to Apple products. They get pissed off if they can’t just turn it on and have it do what it says on the tin. But our world is not their world. And this is not, as I mentioned above, an Epson or Apple or Nikon product. This is from a small Taiwanese company you’d never heard of until you spotted this weird scanner on Amazon.

If you are one of us, and not one of them, and if you’re already suffering with a scanner that requires attention for every frame, you’ll find the 7250Pro3 a soothing balm on your fevered brow. You feed in the uncut film strip, line up the first frame, and away it goes. I set it at 3,600 dpi, half of what it’s rated for, which seems to be about the scanner’s true resolution limit (irrationally exuberant resolution specs are not unique to Pacific Imaging, I should note). It’ll do a roll of 36 exposures in two or three hours, I think. I’m usually asleep while it’s beavering away, and I haven’t really timed it. This is a casual review, remember.  

Are the scans perfect out of the gate? No. But the same can be said of my OpticFilm's output, and honestly, with my casual approach to home processing, my negs are not perfect to begin with. Luckily, I have years of experience in the digital darkroom, so correcting the images is a snap. If you don’t know how to process a digital image, scanning from film is likely to be problematic.

The ICE dust removable works a treat: I don’t even bother to dust my color negs before running them through. ICE doesn’t work with black and white, which actually discourages me from shooting it. Once you’ve experienced the infrared joy of automatic dust removal, the spot healing tool feels like washing dishes by hand, or raising your own children instead of dumping them off on the help. The little villains.

Ease of use aside, the scanner isn’t perfect. But who is? I’ve woken in the morning to find it frozen halfway through a roll, or that it misaligned the frames. I don’t care. It takes a couple of minutes to initiate a new run, and then I can get on with my life, away from my computer.

And what about quality? The short answer is: plenty good for me. If you really care, read this guy’s review. He seems to know what he’s talking about, and you’ll note that his tone is quite positive once he gets the vitriol about CyberView out of his system.

The one thing about a 35mm film scanner is that it only scans 35mm film (this one also does mounted slides, btw, but only one-by-one). You 120 shooters, you microfilm super-spies, you closeted 110 lovers, you sheet film dinosaurs, you daguerreotype mercury huffers, you’re out of luck. Go flatbed, or go home.

One tip: the manual says to scan emulsion side up. This results in the images being reversed, so I assumed it was an error. But no: I once scanned the same strip from both sides, and scanning with the emulsion up resulted in slightly sharper images. But then I discovered that doing it the right way often causes the scanner to choke a few frames into the roll. So doing it the wrong way is actually the right way, especially for Superia 400.

Who is this Jesus to my metal Lazarus? Who chooses to labor, not in the rich, loamy fields of Leica Land, but in the stony talus of Pentax? I called him to find out.

I reached him at his office in Harrow, a suburb of London. He sounds much younger than he must be, and comes across as the kind of person who might stop to help a stranded motorist, even if that motorist wasn't particularly attractive or deserving looking. And if that motorist was your daughter or mother and you tracked down Robin and tried to explain to him how grateful you were that it was him that stopped that night, he would just smile affably and suggest that it was nothing, which is what anyone would say, but he would actually believe it, which is the thing. This may be a lot to infer from a twenty minute phone call about old cameras. I'm just trying to say, he sounds like a nice guy. 

Robin began working at Pentax only a couple of years after I was born, and I am no longer particularly young. He eventually became the technical service manager for Pentax in the UK, the title he held until the company cut its internal staff loose and farmed service out to a third party. In a twist, he stayed on, occupying the building of his former employer, which today is still proudly designated “Pentax House” in large white letters. Are the halls gray lino? Do they echo with the ghosts of film's glory days? I didn't ask, and Robin didn't volunteer. In any case, he’s been repairing Pentax cameras on his own for the last 22 years, a solitary light in a vast darkness.

So Robin, how's tricks?

“I’m very busy at the moment,” he said. “I find that a lot of people who’ve bought a Pentax digital camera have sold a film camera to fund the purchase, and now they’ve gone back and bought, second hand, the film model they sold.”

What about the “film renaissance” we’re always hearing about?

“I’m certainly a lot busier than I was a couple of years ago,” he said.

And who are these people that send him their treasures for resuscitation?

“A character just came in today with an MX that he’d bought new and looked like he’d used a lot. Or somebody will just drag something out of a cupboard. And a lot of stuff is inherited from deceased parents.”

But central to Robin’s business is, of course, the entity that is the cause of and solution to so many of the problems faced by people with an unhealthy interest in old cameras.

“I find a lot of people buy stuff on eBay, and it’s not always faulty, but it always need service.”

Still, he thinks it’s a good deal.

“You can buy an MX on eBay for 50 or 60 pounds, then you factor in [my] service cost, about 80 quid, so for 140 pounds you have a camera that’s going to last you indefinitely.”

What’s coming in?

“I get a lot of MXs, LXs, any sort of Spotmatic, the KX, K2, K1000 [which he called a K-thousand – have I been saying it wrong with the one all this time?]. That’s the bulk of what I get.”

I wanted him to dish some dirt on the Pentax family, who’s made of the sternest stuff, but like a loving father, he refused to play favorites, even though he obviously prefers the star footballer.

“They’re all reliable. I still get SVs, S1As, S3s, going back to the late 50s and early 60s. I get quite a few of those from overseas, and touch wood, I’ve not had one back yet.”

I was surprised to learn that Robin doesn’t shoot film himself (“I have a Panasonic bridge camera that I use, and that’s all I use.”) but in retrospect I suppose I shouldn’t have been. He’s a tradesman, not a hobbyist or a camera fetishist. This is his job. Outside of it, he’s probably a normal person.

Robin was bullish on film in general: “It’d definitely not a flash in the pan. It’s kept me busy for 20 years, and as I said I’m busier now.” But I wondered about the future of his profession. Is there anyone to pass the baton to?

“This is a question I’m asked quite often,” he said. “There are a lot of people my age in the trade, and eventually they’re all going to retire or die off. Who’s going to replace them? They’ve got a lot of knowledge, and there’s nobody else coming into the trade, so it’s a bit of a worry really. Eventually there may be no one left to repair this old stuff.”

This strikes me as particularly true for Pentax. The high value of Leica gear justifies high service fees, which seems to feed a fairly vibrant service ecosystem. Plus, Leica itself still exists as a maker and servicer (albeit at exorbitant cost) of Leica film gear. Nikon seems to have its own world of film-era specialists, and there’s a lot of Nikon gear floating around to support. But when it comes to people who just do Pentax, I’ve only come across Harrow and one other option. Robin has heard of him, too.

“There’s a guy in the States, Eric… Hendrickson, I think? He’s very good. Apart from him, I don’t know anyone else who specializes in Pentax anywhere.”

(And yet Eric offers us hope, in an interview conducted by one K David last year: “I’m training this gal on the K1000, and she’s really good, really talented.” Can I be forgiven for imagining emergent-Jedi Rey deftly removing the top plate, guided by an old master and her innate sense of the Force?)

I asked Robin for some maintenance do’s and don’ts.

“I wish people wouldn’t squirt WD-40 into their cameras,” he said. “You’ve be surprised how often that happens and it’s a real pain to deal with. Oh, and the foam where the mirror goes up, that’ll start to disintegrate and they’ll pick and pick at it, and it’ll get all over the focusing screen. It’s a bugger to clean off, or it’s impossible. And screens aren’t available… I have to harvest them from my stock of faulty cameras, which is time-consuming.” Consider yourself warned.

I also asked him about something that I’m kind of embarrassed to have worried about: Can he tell if a camera’s been sitting on a shelf for ages with the shutter cocked?

“Yes, you can tell. It doesn’t matter so much with the ME Super [which has a metal, vertical-travel shutter] and stuff, but on the cloth shutters, you’ll see that the material will have little ridges in it because it’s been wound over the drum for twenty years.” But wait. “That in itself isn’t detrimental, it just looks unsightly, but strangely enough it doesn’t affect the shutter speeds.” So there you have it. Relax, or don’t, depending on whether or not your obsessiveness extends to the appearance of your shutter curtains.