Warren Kato wrote:
>I was sitting here pondering fill flash problems and setting ratios with OM
>equipment. Has any manufacturer of 35mm SLRs ever made a leaf shutter lens for
>their cameras? I recall there was a Petri (dish?) that used only LS lens but
>was made specifically to be used with LS lens.
Dunno about Petri, but Tokyo Optical (Topcon) had a rather well thought
out line of leaf shutter SLR's with a fairly complete set of interchangeable
lenses: from 28mm to 200mm, plus a 2X TC. (The only such system, btw,
with a true wide-angle lens!)
Their last leaf-shutter SLR body -- the Topcon Unirex, had a fully manual
shutter (B, 1 through 1/500 sec), a hot shoe, TTL averaging as well as spot
metering, shutter priority AE, and more. This was a remarkable achievement
for the time, and the lenses were very good and very cheap. Of course,
flash synchronization was available at all shutter speeds. Topcon later
released a focal-plane shutter body (with sync speed at 1/60) for the same
UV-mount lens set, making it the only system, AFAIK, with both leaf-shutter
AND focal plane shutter bodies.
The system died because of the leaf-shutter limitations: the narrow mount
prevented the development of fast lenses, and wider than 28mm lenses were
infeasible. For an OM user, the UNI/Unirex cameras with their shutter
speed dials placed around the lens mount, have a rather familiar feel.
Cheers,
/Gary Schloss.
Studio City, CA
schloss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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