Horizon Perfekt versus Horizon Kompakt

A 120 degree of panoramic battle! So who’s you’re bet?

Ever since I saw a Horizon shot on lomography.com I wanted to have one of those cameras. “Perfekt” oh what a name and it was an aim of mine that was always on top of my wishlist, but for me as a poor student hardly to afford. So I got a Horizon Kompakt first a while ago and since January 2010 I have a Horizon Perfekt, too.

The Kompakt is as the name suggests, not in size though but it is indeed quite smaller than Perfekt. With it, you have two different settings: Day and night. The day mode is 1/60 seconds and the night mode is ½ seconds with a fixed aperture of f.8. That is it. The advantage of the Kompakt is that it allows you to make double exposures directly one over the other. The Horizon Perfekt on the other hand doe not have this double exposure function (you can make very good doubles though by reloading the film the second time, check out my lomohome to find samples). Therefore it has many, many possibilities! The aperture range is from f.2,8 to f.16 (f.4, f.5,6 f.8, f.11) and the speed is 1/500, 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/8, ¼ and ½ seconds. And you can combine all times with all apertures what allows you to shoot under almost every light condition. One thing I thought in the beginning was that the slower modes are wrong, that they did not work with the Perfekt. But opening the back and looking inside while taking a shot helped me. As the lens is swinging you have a small opening strip that is moving directly behind the lens to expose parts o the film. And that one changes the size due to the speed you choose. So before sending your camera back to LSI saying it is broken have a look there.

Both cameras use 35mm film and produce a negative that is 52mm long (almost twice as long as a normal negative) and use a swinging lens. That is why the film lays a bit curved inside the camera and the lens swings/rotates in a curve. That means also that you have a maximum of 14 shots on a 36 exposure film (normally more 22 than 24!!!) They both are 100% mechanical, so they do NOT need batteries. Another advantage of the Perfekt is the sound. The Kompakt is loud (people are sometimes shocked hearing that sound) and Perfekt is quiet (it is better if you want to shoot from the hip without people knowing you took a picture). Both cameras have Minitar lenses like our beloved LC-A. So where is the “versus”, where is the battle?

Here it comes.

I took both cameras out with me, used the same films and shot under the same light conditions to make the shots comparable. I must say that I had no light meter with me, so it was more or less guessing how the lighting conditions are (for Horizon Perfekt as the Kompakt only has two settings). And I only had developed one film of the Perfekt before, so I am quite new shooting with her. The first film I used was Lomography Slidefilm (200 ISO). The galleries always start with the Kompakt shot, second is Perfekt.

The second film I used was a Hema Color Negative film (400 ISO) which I had not tried before. You can really see it in the results. Another “problem” for me is seeing how sensitive a 400 ISO film really is. I am used to 100 ISO, so I underestimated the power of 400 ISO very often. Sorry for that guys.

So now it is your turn. Get a Horizon camera and shoot, shoot, shooooooooot!

2010-06-07 #gear #review #kompakt #mephisto19 #panorama #tipster #lomoslide #horizon #horizon-kompakt #horizon-perfekt #perfekt #battle #lomoslide-200 #versus #kompakt-versus-perfekt #hema-400-cn #panoramic-picture