Richard Stereo Catalong

 Here is the 1924 catalog from the Richard Verascope company.

Raging Kodak Retina!!!

 Had a bit of shopping therapy the other day and grabbed this little Kodak Retina 1 at the antique store.  A cool $40 but it seemed to work OK.

Did I need it? Already had two others, so this makes no sense. So what else is new?

But it's dang cute. You can see why they competed pretty well against the Leicas of their day.  This little number -- production started in the 30s, had a hiatus during WWII when the factories were building other things and then continued into the 60s -- is smaller and lighter than a Leica I, let along the rangefindered Leicas II and III they competed with.  

This is a camera that would easily fit in a pocket. So did Leicas, before they quit making collapsible lenses.

Being enormously simple in build, there is little to go wrong so this camera works very nicely.  It has no rangefinder to get out of whack.  The Compur-Rapid shutter sounds snappy. Even the slow speeds are not dragging. Nobody has been denting the struts so it opens and closes properly. Focus is a bit stiff, so I suspect the 70-year-old grease in there is dried out a bit.

But is the camera any good? Extrapolating serial number data I figure this one was made in the late 40s, making it as old as I am. 

It has an f3.5 Schneider Rexina Xenar lens, a single-coated little gem.  I've always been partial to the Xenar and its variants. For some reason whites seem to glow with these lenses.  The Schneider optics on my Rollei cameras are really sweet.

Focus is by guesstimation.  There is no rangefinder, and distance markings are in meters, but the maximum aperture of 3.5 gives good depth of field even wide-open.  Most of my shots were outdoors at f8 and 1/250 second. Plus I'm pretty good at judging distance.

To test this I loaded some Kodak Plus-X ASA 100 film, which was processed in D-76 1:1, as per normal directions.  This is a standard film this camera was made to be used with and I wanted it to be happy and feel at home. 

The results?

Really lovely. The resolution of my scanner is never great, so I am betting the prints will have even more detail.  As you can see, however, they came out really nice.