Hello Richard, Emmanuel, Carlos and all,
Thank you for your help.
Thank you to all and hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Nelson
From Nelson :
Hi, I have a Rollei TLR 2.8F Planar which I inherited from my mom. The meter seems to be off by 2 to 3 stop. Can someone recommend a shop that can fix this?
Congratulations. Take care of this camera. Certainly you should have it checked by a competent technician. I could recommend good addresses in Europe, but you probably mean a technician in another continent ;-)
Regarding the meter. There might be several reasons why it is offset by 3 stops.
First you should check some obvious things, at least obvious to Rolleiphiles here ;-) First, check that the filter correction dial is on the "zero" setting. This seems trivial, but this dial was intended to permanently offset the meter when using a contrast colour filter for black and white pictures. Second, check of course that the sensitivity for film is set on the proper ISO value. On a 3,5F you won't find 'ISO' because on the good old says, ASA settings were in use in the New World and DIN settings in the Old World .-) but in fact they mean the same thing and are now unified within the ISO value.
Well now that you've checked this, and if the meter is still offset by substantially more that 1 stop, you should probably have it checked by a competent technician, the selenium sensitive element has probably being ageing beyond any recoverable point, an exchange of the sensitive element might be possible and is the only way to fix this. But there is also a very complex mechanical transmission between the thumb-wheel control buttons on the front panel and the needle that moves inside the am-meter housed inside the focusing knob, so there might be some mechanical offset as well.
Suppose that everything being set to the standard positions, you eventually get only one f-stop of offset, consistent throughout the whole range of brightness values, then you'll just have to modify the ASA setting and you'll be done. Unfortunately, old selenium cells have their characteristic curve that ages erratically, and if you can correct things at one end of the light range, the indications might be wrong on the other end of the range. Here, this behaviour is often referred to as 'your selenium cell has become non linear' which to my opinion is a kind of joke, since the normal behaviour of a light meter is to deliver values on a logarithmic scale ;-);-)
Well, not kidding, as a summary :
- check that everything that should be set to the standard value (filter dial, ASA setting) is properly set,
- check that by playing with the ASA setting you can, or cannot, get consistent readings by comparison with a reliable meter throughout the whole brightness range.
If everything fails, our readers on this list will immediately propose a good technician on your continent. In the US it is quite common to have Rollei TLRs that cross the continent coast-to-coast to be serviced by renowned technicians ;-)
But be prepared to the fact that the meter is not economically repairable if you caompare to the price of a good modern hand-held meter.
Btw, the meter is a Gossen and what is the proper way of using the meter, with diffuser or not?
Basically you use the meter like any classical meter that has a wide angle of acceptance, i.e. about the same angle of view as the angle of view of the standard TLR lens, about 50 to 60 degrees. This is pretty wide by nowadays standards where regular meters fitted with CdS or silicon light detectors "see" only about 30 degrees or less. If you use the meter without diffuser, simply point at the subject. This is called : reflection light reading. It is another tradition among Rollei TLR aficionados to point slightly toward the ground to avoid an excessive amount of light coming from the sky.
With the diffuser, you use the so-called incident light reading. This is very simple and reliable by bright sunshine, simply point the camera with diffuser to the sun and read. This is a perfect solution for subjects with a not-to-wide range of brightnesses and this avoids some mis-readings due to excessive bright or dark areas surrounding the subject. At least the method works if you do not care for details in those bright or dark areas !! usually for colour slides, the plague is when bright areas are "burned-white" without details. It is considered acceptable to "burn" the highlights in a colour slide only if the burned areas are quite small and outside the main subject. On the contrary, using b&W negatives you usually want to get details in the shadows. So as you can see there is no simple answer to the proper use of a meter.
BTW, I have found that the incident light reading is not so easy to understand by overcast sky or very diffuse ambient light like foggy days.
I hope you'll allow me a digression here. The worse case I have found, where, IMHO, the classical selenium meter fails be it with or without diffuser is a snow landscape by overcast/grey sky. There is a strange paradox, snow looks and __is__ actually brighter that the overcast winter sky at the horizon. In fact the overcast sky is much darker at the horizon that at the zenith.
This phenomenon is explained by Prof. Marcel Minanert in his beloved textbook on "Light and Colour in the Outdoors".
To check this (soon for our readers of the southern hemisphere, but you've to wait until next winter for the others ;-);-), fit your meter with or without the incident light diffuser and point either to the snow/ground or to the zenith, you'll find the same light reading which is fortunate, snow cannot be brighter that the source of light illuminating it ;-);-)
I also intend to change the focusing screen, what is the best screen for this camera.
Your 2,8F is fitted with an interchangeable focusing screen that you can change yourself without tool. Doing this you have no risk to change the proper registration, so in principle the position of the screen does not have to be fine-tuned by a technician. There are several aftermarket "bright" screens ; personally I like the original screen and I have only changed it on a used Rolleicord Vb only because it was exceedingly scratched by unfortunate attempts to clean it by the previous owner. Original Rollei TLR screens are made of a kind of plastic which can be scratched easily. Old TLR screens before 1958 were true ground glass but were quite dim.
I got a new screen for my Rolleicord from Photo Suffren in Paris who has a supply of modern 600x-like modern screens, but cut to the exact size of classical (1958-1981) rollei TLRs ; newer (post-1987) GX/FX screens are in fact slightly smaller that the older ones (they are the same as the SL66 and 600x series), like you have on your 2,8F. This new screen is identical except for dimensions to the ones that fit the 600x Rollei SLR series. It is definitely much brighter and a pleasure to use.
To my opinion changing the screen is not an absolute priority. Fixing the meter is also not the priority since you can use an independent hand-held meter. The absolute priority to me is on mechanics and optics. The optics should be perfectly clean, the shutter should work perfectly.
There is something extremely important that was explained to me by one of the Parisian Rollei experts, Gérard Métrot (Photo Suffren), and I am sure everybody here will agree, this has been discussed many times, i.e. that the front panel that carries the optics should be perfectly aligned and in perfect registration with respect to the film plane. Many users of used TLRs blame their optics for un-sharp results before having the camera checked by a technician for proper mechanical alignment. When a Rollei TLR is properly aligned, the results you get are so amazingly sharp for somebody that has only an experience with small format cameras, that it is unbelievable ;-);-)
So you should make a roll of film, I would recommend a roll of fine grained colour slides like a Kodak Ektachrome G or Fuji Provia and you'll immediately see if the results are sharp, the colours correct, etc... Of course for this you'll have to use a separate meter, but you can use a 35Mm SLR camera of use the readings.
Good luck and do not hesitate to ask all the questions here !!
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