Brooks - Plaubel Veriwide 100
1960
120 roll film
6cm x 10cm image size
7 exposures per roll
47mm f/8 Schneider-Kreuznach
Super-Angulon (coated)
Synchro-Compur (B - 1/500th, MXV sync)
Leitz Wetzlar Veriwide 100 finder
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The Brooks Plaubel Veriwide 100 is a very special camera. Manufactured by Plaubel Feinmechanik in Frankfurt exclusively for its designer, Burleigh Brooks in New York, it is a very compact 120 roll film camera and is called "Veriwide 100" because its field of view (measured diagonally) is 100 degrees. Only about 4,000 Veriwide 100s were made.
The Veriwide was sold without an optical viewfinder. Instead it has a built-in wire frame viewfinder that works by keeping your eye the correct distance from a metal frame so that the metal frame indicates the field-of-view of the camera. You don't actually have to look through the tiny hole in the eyepiece, you can also look around it - but the further your eye strays from the center the less accurate it is. Most of us (including myself) are more comfortable using an optical viewfinder.
Leitz Wetzlar made an accessory viewfinder for the Veriwide which addressed its need for an optical finder (bottom photo). Leitz also provided a standard Leica-branded lens cap for the Veriwide's Schneider lens.
Although very wide, the 47mm f/8 Super-Angulon lens is a true wide angle lens, not a fisheye lens. A fisheye lens will distort the subject whereas a normal (orthoscopic) wide angle lens like the Super-Angulon will flatten it. This "flattening" results in some stretching of objects near the edges of the frame but straight lines will always appear straight in images made with this lens.
The Veriwide 100 doesn't have a rangefinder but it has a great deal of depth-of-field and is therefore quite easy to focus.
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