Universal Camera Corporation Mercury ll half frame camera
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ก.ย. 2024
- An exhaustive look at the Universal Mercury ll half frame camera and the era from which it came; the late 40's and early 1950's. Why should you care? Because it has a rotary shutter and a neat design!
Errata: "Joe Pesci plays Arthur Fellig, aka WeeGee the photographer"
I love how eccentric this video is. I just got two Mercury II's for $100 and this was an enjoyable way to get acquainted with these weird cameras.
You paid about $80 too much.
Nicely researched and produced video….. you’re the man!
And super cool camera, too! Thank you!
I absolutely love how the video was composed and narated, id love to see more videos of cameras from ya!
I just got a mercury ii cx (serial 77652) and learned more from your video than all the other vids combined
I know the vod is 3 years old but still awesome
I took one of these to a tractor and equipment meet, never been asked so many questions about my camera. Developed pics, the colors, especially reds were crazy looking, lens must be for b&w
Yes, The Argus C3 is also an attention grabber. The early coatings were probably formulated for colour too, as the film was definitely around, but the chemistry wasn't very good. Even in the past 15 years lens makers have been improving their coatings. Was it expired film?
The Argus C3 was worth every penny at the time. It was the first full-featured 35mm camera that was within reach of the average middle-class worker. That has a lot to do with why it stayed in production for 27 years without any major changes being made to it.
The funny thing about the shutter speed, is while it was fast for it’s day, there were actually quite a number of shutters that were capable of 1/1000s. A lot of the professional cameras of the era had 1/1000s focal plane shutters going as far back as the 1900’s, thanks in part to Folmer and Schwing, also known as Graflex. The Press Graflex of the teens and 20’s, was a 5x7 plate camera capable of 1500s top speed, in an era when the film speed wasn’t even into the double or triple digits, and the lenses topped out at ƒ/6.3 or ƒ/4.5. The speed graphic handheld camera was also synchronized for those higher speed in the later years as well. In fact the moving element fixed speed focal plane shutter had been experimented on in Germany and the US for a few years as well. But the moving element design was pretty unreliable until it was applied to small format cameras, like the Leica or Contax.
What the mercury achieves is still important though. It gets a few things right immediately, one being a greatly simplified but just as reliable focal plane shutter design which was cheap to produce and provided consistent and reliable flash synchronization when synchronization meant all kinda of Rube Goldberg kinds of flash synchronizers. It also makes the “candid camera” format of 135 more accessible, especially with the half frame format making it much more economical for those who shot it. (When kodak and everyone else had adopted “full frame” or the 828 format). It also paved the way with it’s hot shoe sync, and finally it showed the path to innovation that future Japanese camera builders would demonstrate as they transitioned from copying western designs to innovating on their own. The only other 35mm still camera with a rotating variable aperture shutter is non other than the Olympus Pen F from the 60’s. (Another half frame design)
Univex mainly sold film in a unique roll format, and some very simple, cheaply made cameras to use it. From the mid-1930s, the original Mercury was something of an upgrade with a novel shutter design, but it was manufactured with the same lack of tolerances and cheap aluminum parts as other Univex cameras. After WWII, Univex tried to re-enter the camera business by modifying the Mercury, now "II" shown in the video, to take standard 35mm film. It used a simple 3-element lens which was barely snapshot quality on the small half-frame sized format. Both of the Mercury models had an uncommonly short useful life, because the cheap design omitted parts used in most cameras to prevent wear and tear from normal use, such as using friction sleeves where others used ball bearings. One consequence is that if you actually shoot a roll of 35mm through a Mercury II, you are likely to come away with aluminum dust from internal parts grinding again each other. But for its novel rotary shutter, the Mercurys would have been consigned to a long list of poorly designed, US- made cameras and long forgotten.
Awesome work on this review. Thanks for the effort making it
My pleasure. I was hoping to keep going with Cyanotypes and more cameras, but it's so much work!
@@LeifNorman I know running a TH-cam channel is a treadmill and to make a proper review sometimes takes me weeks to put together. I started cyanotypes about 3 weeks ago and I'm getting great results one of these days I need to do a tutorial and all the things I learned to avoid mistakes
@@Raychristofer Yes! Do a Cyano Video!
Great video! I hope you can make more videos like this.
Tricor is the name of the lens manufacturer.
Excellent video, thank you!
Masterpiece camera OLYMPUS PEN F had disc shutter
Awesome video, and a little bit of information in regard to it being the only film camera with a circular shutter. There was another Camera, The Olympus Pen-F which did come out quite some time later, but used a rotating titanium disk to basically do the same thing as this camera.
Oh! That's cool. I did not know about the Pen-F
I know I'm 2 years late or so, but the Soviet Kiev 10 and then the Kiev 15 were the first cameras to sport fully automatic setting, including aperture, usingba proprietary lens mount named Avtomat. They also used, not circular but fan-like shutters, which were very effective at doing their job but all the automation made these cameras a real pain in the butt to fix in case something went wrong.
A little fun fact just like that :)
A rotary shutter can also be found on all SLR Olympus Pen F cameras. since 1963.
The shutter was made of titanium. X- sync at 1/500
Four SLR types Pen F, Pen FV, Pen FT and Pen F medical
What’s the song in the beginning of the video?
The video was very good, and I may be convinced on getting myself an old half-frame camera to save on film.
The song is from the album behind me. 1967 Gene Dloughy and his band in Regina Saskatchewan. Can't remember which track.
Universal also made a Model CC-1500, named for its top shutter speed. But you probably knew that.
i need more leif
Most mercury IIs do have coated lenses. Yours is probably an early one
CC “camera corp”?
Hou mach grami red mercury haev un camera pl
TI PREGO QUATO GRAMI HAVE UN CAMERA TI PREGO
This video takes things way too far... #andineedmore