Dallmeyer Baby Speed Reflex
The Baby Speed Reflex is a single-lens reflex camera for 4.5x6 cm plates, made by Newman & Guardia for Dallmeyer of London, in the mid-1920s.[1] Although Dallmeyer did not make the camera, it has Dallmeyer's 4 inch f/2.9 Pentac lens.
The camera has a fairly typical design for a box-form reflex camera of the time. It is wooden-bodied, with leather covering. There is a ground-glass focusing screen in the top of the camera body, for full-frame reflex focusing, and a folding leather focusing hood over this screen. A ground-glass screen can also be attached at the rear of the camera, to use it as a view camera.
It has Newman and Guardia's focal-plane shutter, giving speeds 1/10 - 1/800 second, plus 'B' and 'T'. As is usual on such cameras, the shutter release lever raises the mirror.
The camera has rack-and-pinion focusing, moving the lens board out on the front on a bellows. Unusually, the focusing rack is not on a pair of rails each side of the lens board (as on, for example, the Ensign Reflex) but is moulded into the bottom of a bed below the bellows.[2] The notes at Early Photography state that the camera has a rising front,[1] but this facility cannot be seen in the photographs of any of the cited examples.
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Baby Speed Reflex at Early Photography.
- ↑ Baby Speed Reflex sold at the fifteenth Westlicht Photographica Auction, on 23 May 2009.
Links
- Baby Speed Reflex sold in December 2002 (lot 71 of sale 9516) by Christie's in London.
