This is a Minolta Maxxum 7000, a 35mm SLR made by Minolta Camera Corp in Japan between the years 1985 and 1988. This version of the camera was sold for export in North America, and when sold in Europe and Japan was known as the 7000 AF and α-7000, respectively. …
The site move to Bluehost occupied a bit of my time (although not nearly as much as I had thought), but I considered skipping a Recommended Reading post for this week, but I am glad I didn’t as there was a good selection of worthwhile posts this week to talk…
When digital cameras first started to gain momentum in the early 21st century, they came with many conveniences over film, one of which was eliminating the recurring cost of buying film and having it developed. With a digital camera, once you pay for the camera, every photo you ever take…
Well that was fast! Not even 24 hours after I began, I have officially moved everything over to Bluehost, this site’s new home for at least the next 5 years. If you’re reading this post, then you’re already here and hopefully you have already noticed significant speed improvements on the…
After nearly 7 years running mikeeckman.com on a home built Windows 2008 server that sits in my basement (it was originally in a closet), the time has come to move to a new host. With the support of your kind donations and revenue generated through Google Adsense, the site has…
This is an Ihagee Auto-Ultrix type 2850, an auto-erecting folding camera made by Ihagee Kamerawerk, Steenbergen & Co. Dresden between the years 1932 and 1939. The Auto-Ultrix family had many variants, but the type 2850 produced eight 4cm x 6.5cm images on 127 format roll film. This particular example was…
Another historical lens article by Cheyenne Morrison, and another post of the week. I gotta hand it to James Tocchio, owner of Casual Photophile for convincing Cheyenne to write these highly detailed and fascinating historical lens articles for him as these things are right up my alley. Cheyenne goes back…
Although branded as a Canon DL-9000, this camera was made by a Taiwanese company called New Taiwan Photographic Corp. who produced a dizzying array of inexpensive knock off “scameras” or “trashcams” that mimic the design of professional quality SLR cameras, but with far worse quality. New Taiwan produced cameras have…
This is a Walz Envoy 35, a 35mm rangefinder camera made by Walz Company, LTD of Tokyo Japan from 1958 to around 1961. The Envoy was an up-level model of the earlier Walz 35 and came with an excellent 7-element Kominar lens, built by Nittō Kōgaku of Japan. Walz was…
I’ve been reviewing cameras for nearly 5 years on mike eckman dot com, and while it’s been a lot of fun, many other vintage camera blogs have come and risen to the occasion doing basically the same thing I’ve been doing. Casual Photophile, 35mmc, Kosmo Foto, Japan Camera Hunter, EMULSIVE,…
This week’s featured post is a very well written and thorough dive into Nikon’s Pre-AI (sometimes called non-AI) lens system. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, AI stands for “Automatic Indexing” and was a way in which the position of the aperture ring could be automatically coupled to…
Kodak’s Plus-X was a type of fine-grained, medium speed panchromatic black and white film originally released in 1938 as Eastman Plus-X, a motion picture stock rated at ASA 50. In the 1940s, it quickly became popular with still photographers as an alternative to slower orthochromatic films of the day. The…
