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Imagine you get behind the wheel of a new car, and suddenly discover that the pedals have been changed around. The accelerator is now on the left, the clutch is in the middle, and the brake on the right! You hunt around for the gear lever, only to find it behind your seat in a position that you can reach if you don’t mind dislocating your shoulder! Happy? I doubt it! Carefully, very carefully, talking yourself through every action like a pilot on his first solo, you manage to drive it out onto the road. After a couple of miles, you realize that in spite of all the quirks, you’ve bought a very high performance car with superb handling, even if it means learning to drive again! Welcome to the world of the Rollei 35! Introduced in time for Photokina in 1966, I can’t help thinking that the designers must have either been collectively insane, or just too brilliant for us mere mortals to understand. Probably the latter. Well, a pull-out lens wasn’t new - Leica thought of that trick decades before. A left-hand film winder wasn’t exactly a novelty, either, the ill-fated Alpa SLRs and various Exacta-Ihagee models had this, too. But shutter and aperture controls on the FRONT! Flash shoe on the BOTTOM!! Insanity! Or maybe just a successful attempt to blow away some paradigms, to nail the "We’ve-Always-Done-It-Like-That" brigade firmly into their coffins and teach them a lesson in precision engineering at the same time? Read on! I’ve spent years looking at these unique cameras, picking them up, playing with them, and contemplating buying one. I’ve spoken to delighted owners. I could never really understand what all the fuss was about, and why the prices seem to rocket every year. Until I broke down, in a fit of affluence, and actually bought a black Singapore-built Rollei 35S of my very own. The meter wasn’t working - a fact that the seller (ebay) omitted to mention. However, the general condition was pretty much mint, without the usual dings and dents that you usually see. I’ve seen so many beaten-up Rollei 35 cameras that I was beginning to believe the dents were put on at the factory - (What’s your job, then, Hans? Oh, I work for Rollei! I give each Rollei 35 a couple of smacks with a toffee hammer as they come off the line!) Not a scratch or a mark on it, it came with the original lens hood and Rollei 30.5mm skylight filter. I guess it was probably worth the money, since it really looked like it had run a maximum of three films. The bad news first. A point-and-shoot camera it isn’t. Without a basic knowledge of photography, a beginner used to today’s do-everything machinery might be disappointed at first. Aperture and shutter speed have to be manually set, and focusing is done by guesstimation. The meter can be easily fooled by scenes with a lot of light, so it’s safer to meter off a neutral area like grass or pavement. Any modern AF p&s compact camera will be one heck of a lot easier to use, and for most purposes will give similar results. But this little Rollei is by far the better learning tool, and the challenge of using a camera that’s anything but easy can actually improve your work! Now the good news - what you get with this tiny box is a fully manual, totally controllable miniature 35mm camera with a fixed 40mm lens capable of truly stunning results. I’ve not had a chance to test out the slightly cheaper Tessar-lensed version, I’ve read it’s pretty good, too. But based on two or three test films - slides and B&W, under a variety of different lighting conditions, the 40mm f-2.8 Sonnar lens is at least as sharp as the sharpest lens I own, the 55mm Micro-Nikkor. This came as a real surprise for me, I’ve heard it claimed and advertised but I tend to be VERY skeptical about wild statements like that. I printed a couple of fine-grain B&W tree negatives up to 16 x20. It’s true, at least with mine. Edge to edge sharp, and not unduly bothered by flare either. This little Rollei has a folding film pressure plate that seems to keep the film plane very much flatter than most 35mm cameras, at least judging by the sharpness even wide open at the edges. I had to use a hand-held meter, but I’m looking forward to getting it back with the built in meter working.
As for the fixed lens, 40mm isn’t quite a "standard" but it’s not really a true wide angle either. Minox, with their very successful folding-lens 35mm cameras (GL, GT, etc), stuck with 35mm lenses from the start. But 40mm gives you sufficient depth of field for guess-focus not to be a problem. Set the lens at five meters and the f-stop at 5.6, and everything between about three and a half meters to infinity will be sharp. The shutter is a mechanical leaf shutter, with speeds from 1/500th down to ½ second plus ‘B’. As with all leaf shutters, it will synchronize at all speeds for effective daylight fill flash. There is no self timer - sadly forgotten in the drive to keep the camera as small as possible - but the shutter button does at least have a threaded hole for a cable release. To open for business, your first move is to pull out the lens tube and twist it to the right until it clicks into place. You can’t push the lens back in until the shutter is cocked, meaning that the camera spends most of its life with a cocked shutter. This practice is normally frowned upon, since with most cameras it would leave the springs under too much tension, but obviously Rollei used suitable materials to overcome this. My own almost virginal 35S obviously spent decades ignored in its case, and the shutter works as sweetly as new. The viewfinder is primitive but accurate, there are etched markings inside the larger view with tick marks for the inevitable close-distance parallax error. A close
To use a flash, you’ll have to turn the camera upside down. The latest version, the Classic, has the flash shoe on top, but my 1977 S-version still has it on the bottom. There are solutions. Rollei made a special bracket which puts the flash on the left side and slightly higher than the lens. Another option is to use a sync cord adapter with a bracket mounted flash - but I feel pretty silly wielding a massive Metz 60 CT-1 with this cigarette packet sized camera cowering on the bracket! The size of the Rollei 35 encourages you to take it with you everywhere. The solidly engineered construction encourages you not to worry too much about breaking it - obviously it was built to last. The battery - a single PX625 (now outlawed but still obtainable) 1.35 volt mercury cell, lives in an almost inaccessible compartment within the film chamber. For the future, Rollei can re-calibrate the light meter to take the modern 1.5 volt equivalents. Bottom line: a terrific little camera, built to be used. Get used to its strange controls, and you’ll love it. It’s easy to see why it still has such appeal today. I’d give it five stars for the optics and overall quality, but only two for ergonomics!
Copyright © 2001 by Mike Graham. All rights reserved. |
