Lomopedia: Konica IIIA

The Konica IIIA was built in 1958 but is still regarded to have one of the brightest and clearest viewfinders in the market. It is still praised by a lot of collectors and photographers for its prized viewfinder and fluid shooting mechanism. It's also a winner in terms of build quality and features. Let's dive down deep to learn more about this celebrated rangefinder.

This particular camera comes from a long line of 35 mm fixed lens, leaf shutter rangefinders from Konica. The company was known before as Konishiroku but opted to undergo a re-branding scheme after World War 2, hence the change to Konica (it followed the trend of constructing the abbreviated name of the manufacturer and adding the suffix "ca" as per Leica and Yashica.) Actually, the Konica name came first for the camera and was then adopted by the company thereafter.

The Konica IIIA has quite a following up to this day mainly because of its great features, high-quality build, and its widely popular 1:1 viewfinder. The said viewfinder lets users view the scene with great efficiency all thanks to its good design. It's also the first camera to have continuous field size correction that fixes parallax and view angle errors.

It came in two versions — the domestic that was sold in Japan that used a 48 mm f/2 Hexanon lens with a Seikosha MXL shutter and an export version that used a 50 mm f/1.8 Hexanon lens with a larger Seikosha MXL shutter. Both models used a coated 6-element lens. The IIIA also featured a front, dual-stroke trigger wind similar to that of the Zeiss Tenax II that lets left-eyed shooters use the camera without poking their eyes with the winder. This feature also allows shooting and winding without taking the eye away from the finder.

Still quite the contender in the used camera market today, the Konica IIIA offers these along with good mechanical components, smooth shooting, and quite a head-turning look. It's simply one of those cameras you'd have to learn more about for you to appreciate its roots and capabilities.

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Technical Specifications

Standard Lenses: coated 48 mm f/2 Hexanon lens with a Seikosha MXL Shutter (domestic) 50 mm f/1.8 Hexanon lens with a larger Seikosha MXL shutter, fixed
Shutter: MXL shutter 1 to 1/500 sec, Bulb
Focusing: rangefinder
Aperture Control: iris-type mechanism
Flash: X synch for all shutter speeds
Film Type: 35 mm film
Winding Mechanism: front dual-stroke manual lever
Film Rewind: manual
Dimensions: 138 × 81 × 65 mm
Viewfinder: 1:1 bright viewfinder with field size correction
Weight: 800 g

All information used in this article was sourced from Dante Stella, Konica Awardspace, Camerapedia and Butkus/Orphan Cameras

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2018-03-25 #gear #lomopedia #rangefinder #gear #lomopedia #konica-iiia