Sunday, July 18, 2010

Gakkenflex 35mm twin lens reflex

I got myself a new toy to celebrate the end of last week - the Gakkenflex 35mm twin lens reflex (TLR). This TLR is a super cool functional toy camera and it comes with the 25th edition of the otona no kagaku magazine (i loosely translate if from the seemingly chinese words into "Adult Science Magazine"). Yea aa.. you can now go around and tell people I enjoy adult japanese stuffs.. tsk. Why is it a toy camera? The camera is made of plastic and is 100% DIY. The kit comes with all the assembly parts and an instructions manual in japanese. The japanese manual doesn't pose much of a problem to anyone with some cognitive ability to associate pictures with the individual parts. The only thing that is going to slow you down is probably the pretty model in the front cover.

Some specifications:-

The fixed f-stop is f/11 and the single shutter speed is 1/125. The camera uses standard 35mm film cassettes and exposes a 24mm x 36mm frame in portrait orientation. The lens is a single element plastic meniscus lens. Focusing of the taking and viewing lenses is synchronized by external gears, in the same way as the geared lens Ricohflex.


If you are interested, you can easily find one in the japanese magazine section of Kinokuniya. Priced at ard 50sgd, it is pretty affordable.

"otona no kagaku magazine."-cj

"here is where the fun starts."-cj

"first we screwed the left and the right sides. be warned they do not give many extra screws."-cj

"this aperture control is the tricky part. the springs are quite a handful."-cj

"there. the box frame is up."-cj

"missing the lens."-cj

"the completed camera!"-cj


i'm in for some analog fun.

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