Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta C 531/2
1954
120 roll film
6cm x 9cm image size
8 exposures per roll
105mm f/3.5 Zeiss Tessar (coated)
Synchro-Compur (B - 1/500th, MX sync)
coupled rangefinder
optional 6cm x 4.5cm image size mask
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The Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta C 531/2 is a great camera. It's 100% mechanical. The only thing electrical about it is the Synchro-Compur shutter's sync output - which is to trigger a flash. This camera is from the 1950's so it has M sync for flash bulbs and X sync for electronic flash.
The 105mm Tessar lens on this camera is sharp even when wide open and exhibits only a little vignetting (darkening near the corners of the image) when it's wide open. The fact that it's a Zeiss Tessar doesn't indicate the quality of the lens - some Tessars are great, some are not. "Tessar" simply indicates the lens design - four elements in three groups. This one is good because it was made by Zeiss in the 1950's for their top-of-the-line Ikonta camera after WWII when relatively high quality glass was available and after they had begun to use lens coatings, which reduce internal reflections in a lens and thus make it faster and higher contrast.
This camera is a wonderful piece of engineering. The coupled rangefinder allows you to focus the lens very accurately even though you're not actually looking through the taking lens (as you do with an SLR, for example). The way it works is when you rotate the front element of the lens (to focus it) a system of tiny gears inside the black and chrome arm sticking up from the front of the lens rotates two circular glass wedges at the top of that arm in opposite directions. These wedges have the effect of bending the light that passes through them, thus aligning (or not aligning) the two images of the subject you see in the rangefinder. When the two images in the rangefinder are aligned the lens is focussed. |
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