Coronet Rapide

For a long time i was dreaming about folding camera in my collection, so one day i just jumped in to ebay and after couple clicks, i had a huge auction list of various folding cameras.

For a long time i was dreaming about folding camera in my collection, so one day i just jumped in to ebay and after couple clicks, i had a huge auction list of various folding cameras. My eyes caught couple of cameras and i could not resist them, i grabbed all of them. One of my chosen ones was Coronet Rapide camera. Coronet was a British camera maker and it has produced lot of various models, but only four of them where folding: Coronet, Coronet Rapide, Coronet Clipper and Coronet Rex. Well i don’t know how many pieces of Coronet Rapide was produced, but i could say this camera is a bit rare. I could not find any manual or any other information of it.

Anyway this camera is super user friendly, it‘s almost point and shoot camera. It has fixed f/11 aperture, fixed focus (From my experience everything is in focus from 5 foots) and the only thing you can change is shutter speed, it has two modes: time – for night shooting (same like B ) and instant mode (which i guess is between 1/60s and 1/125s ). Coronet Rapide same like Smena 8m or Lubitel has a shutter cock function, that means shutter is not connected to the film advance function and you can easily make doubles, triples or even quadruples. This little monster eats 120 film and compared with meniscus glass lens, produces 8 super large, sometimes a bit light leaked 6×9 pictures.

When i saw my first shots i was very surprised. I don’t know is it just me, but looking at those pictures, i would say this camera has same dreamy, radiant, lo-fi images style as Diana does.What do you think?

written by dogma on 2009-09-03 #gear #120 #review #metal #england #vintage #point-and-shoot #b-w #6x9 #lo-fi #folding-camera #kodak-ektachrome-64t #coroner-rapide #kodak-t-max #meniscus-lens