[rollei_list] Re: Rollei 3003

  • From: Hauke Fath <hauke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:53:54 +0200

At 18:28 Uhr -0400 29.3.2010, Elias_Roustom wrote:
>On Mar 29, 2010, at 6:00 PM, CarlosMFreaza wrote:
>
>> Rollei 3003 was and is considered one of the bests and more complete
>> 35mm SLR systems ever made.
>
>I just looked this camera up - WOW!
>
>http://www.cameraquest.com/rol3003.htm
>
>Was Rollei just terrible at marketing, or did they charge way too much
>for their gear, and no one bought it?

A bit of both, I guess.

The Rolleiflex SL 2000 got caught up in the messy last years of the (old)
Franke & Heidecke, and cost-cutting interfered with its inherent
complexity. It quickly got a reputation for being unreliable, despite being
built in Braunschweig, not Singapore.

While Rollei Fototechnic fixed that to some extent (*) with the 3003, the
price tag remained, and still the 3003 was lacking in what were hot
features of the day - program exposure modes, multi field light metering,
motoric rewind (**). I see a general weakness of the German camera
manufacturers when it comes to electronics; Leica cured that by teaming up
with Minolta, but Rollei decided to roll its own (pardon the pun) and for
most of the time did rather poorly.

My personal experience with the 3003 includes frequent service because of
less than robust film transport, ridiculous issues like sticky exposure
buttons, and an annoying tendency of the viewfinder to collect dust.

"A beautiful camera, but..."

        hauke


(*) I remember a German consumer organisation testing the top dogs of the
day - Nikon F3, Canon F1, Pentax LX, and Rolleiflex 3003. The Rolleiflex
was the first to break in an endurance test, by a large margin.

(**) Building a camera with motoric film transport, then having to rewind
the films manually -- how lame is that?


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)


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