Cosina Japan officially announced the end of production of the Bessa R2-M/R3-M/R4-M mirrorless M-mount film camera. That’s another small piece of rangefinder film camera history dying today 🙁
This was the poor mans Leica camera. You can still find the Bessas used on eBay (auctions list here).
9 Responses
This camera is not mirrorless. It requires mirrors to throw the rangefinder split image. Else it would not be a coupled viewfinder/rangefinder. Thus, a mirror is used in focusing, as in SLRs, but unlike in mirrorless cameras.
Formally true, but if, say, the Fuji X-Pro1’s successor finally came out and its optical viewfinder suddenly included a real rangefinder, it would still belong to the ‘mirrorless’ group of cameras. The Bessa, on the other hand, doesn’t – but not because of the rangefinder mirrors, but because it’s a film camera, and the camera class defined by the ‘mirrorless’ moniker simply does not include film cameras…
Apparently one of those oddities of the interweb camera world. Anything not featuring reflex viewing is mirrorless.
It’s like spelling “raw” in capital letters (“RAW”) for some incomprehensible reason when you are referring to sensor output.
And, no, you cannot see a vampire through a reflex viewfinder. Note that you can only see part of the vampire in a coupled rangefinder camera- you cannot see the central superimposed image, since that is caused by mirrors. Therefore, you must use zone focusing.
Just a quick question, as you seem to be oddly familiar with the subject… Can you see a vampire when you look at one through the viewfinder of DSLR?
Then, maybe, that is not the mirror they are referring to when they mention mirrorless…?
Litterally yes, it has a mirror, but when we talk about mirrors/reflex we think about that noisy slappy thing.
There’s still the Zeiss Ikon, which, just like the Bessa, comes from Cosina and shares much technology with the Bessa – with a few additional features and, unfiortunately, a significantly higher price.
That said, I find all those rangefinder cameras too big and to heavy for my tastes. If there still was a camera like the Leica CL or Minolta CLE, possibly with better rangefinder, I might be tempted… Actually, I might even be buying a well-preserved CLE one of these days.
CLs and CLEs are readily available today. I bought a CL about 6 months ago.
No new ones, of course, but who cares? They still work great.
This makes me quite sad actually. A CLE is still a good M-Mount entry level film camera, but it has frame lines that don’t really work for most M lenses, and if I understand correctly, wont meter in full manual mode.