2021-03-02 04:34, from Louis Smit:
> Hello Everybody,
>
> I picked up the Rollei 35 SE today ....
Hello from France!
Congratulations. I have been using a Rollei 35 SE since ... the 1980's!
As far as battery use is concerned for the 35 SE and TE models, as
mentioned before, you do not need any meter adjustment, the internal
circuit of the SE/TE accepts more than the original 5.6V without damage
and without needing to be re-calibrated.
For years after the ban on mercury batteries, I had used batteries named
S27PX, a silver-oxide stack of 4 cells with almost, but not quite, the
same physical dimensions as the original PX27 mercury battery. This
S27PX battery was expensive and the shape was not always adapted to the
Rollei's battery holder.
So nowadays taking into account that the meter is insensitive to
variations of voltage, I have eventually accepted that a silver oxide
battery is useless for the Rollei 35 SE/TE: the main advantage of silver
oxide cells is that their voltage keeps constant throughout battery
life, at 1.55 volt, unlike alkaline batteries for which voltage drops
regularly.
So today I'm using an alkaline battery named PX27G, its shape is good,
lifetime might be shorter than the silver oxide S27PX and much shorter
than the original 5.6V mercury battery, but taking into account the
price you pay for film and processing, not mentioning your car expenses
when going out taking pictures further away than 500 yards from home,
the additional expenses in batteries, for the Rollei 35, are really
negligible.
There is also a battery adapter sold by the camera repair shop FFS in
Braunschweig, Germany,
https://www.ebay.de/itm/Batterie-Umrustsatz-PX27-fur-Rollei-35SE-TE-Rollei-35LED-Rollei-A110/184533895293
but for me the alkaline battery 27PXG does the job perfectly.
> ... The
> zone (or scaler) focusing may be a challenge. I have never owned a
> camera like that so will have to see how that works out. Are there any
> tips about this?
> Cheers, Louis
Well, if guess-focusing / zone-focusing was a real challenge, their
would have been no amateur photography with simple folding rollfilm
cameras or simple non-reflex 35 mm cameras for about one century ;-)
Do not worry, here is a short summary of the use of distance scales on
the Rollei 35, I had posted this text a long time ago on this list, but
since, the Rollei 35 is still alive and well and the advice is still valid!
---------------
I looked at the DOF scale on my R35-SE and found that the hyperfocal
distance H vs F-number N obeys the rule HxF = 66 meters. BTW this yields
an circle of sharpness (circle of confusion ) of about 24 microns (~
1/100 inch: reverse-engineering the formula H = f^2/Nc is not rocket
science ;-) )
So in fact if you are an addict of ISO 25 films like me in the golden
age of Kodachrome ;-) you can still use the hyperfocal distance with
the 40mm lens of any R-35 (or any other 40mm lens, with a 24 micron
sharpness criterion, whatever the format might be !!!) to get sharp
pictures as follows.
at f/11, focus on 6 m and everything is "sharp" from 3m to infinity.
at f/8, you have in most cases to choose between 2 ranges : #1 :
infinity-4m (focus on ~8m), and #2 : 4m to 2m (focus on ~3m). So the
choice is very easy.
1/125s at f/8 on KM25 was my standard outdoor setting, in bright
sunshine, in the good old days ; nowadays with ISO-100 color slide or
ISO-200 color negs, it's so easy!!
at f/5.6, 3 ranges : #1, infinity-6m (focus on 12m) ; #2, 6m-3m (focus
on 4m) and #3, 3m-2m (focus on 2.4m). Still easy to choose according to
the subject : e.g. #1 for general landscape, #2 for a group of adults,
#3 for children or 1 adult standing (vertical frame). 1/125s at f/5.6
was also very common for me outdoors with KM25.
Things become actually difficult at f/4 with 4 ranges:
#1, infinity-8m (focus on 16m) ; #2, 8m-4m (focus on 5.5m) ; #3, 4m-2.7m
(focus on 3.3m) and #4 2.7m-2m (focus on 2.4m).
But the real difficulty is below 2 m if you want to take, say,
pictures of flowers. For flowers I set to the minimum distance about
1m and use my arm to estimate the distance. It works surprisingly
well ;-) but I stop down to f/16, even f/22, although I know that
stopping-down a Sonnar 2.8/40 to f/22 ruins its performance due to
diffraction, and should be strictly prohibited by Law to any serious
Zeiss-Rollei user !
---------------
Enjoy your Rollei 35!!
--
Emmanuel Bigler
Besançon, France
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