[rollei_list] Re: Rollei -Singapore
- From: Don Williams <dwilli10@xxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:46:33 -0600
At 08:09 AM 1/9/2009, Emmanuel wrote, in part:
From DAW:
Rollei 35- A few years back I attended a book signing by David
Breashears, the man who did the IMax film about climbing Mount
Everest. He spotted a Rollei 35 in the audience and had the owner
come up. Breashears really praised the camera and said it was his
favorite for climbing (that special IMax he took up the mountain was
clearly not a favorite, just something he had contracted to use). He
thought the Rollei was rugged, reliable, and just a very fine piece
of equipment for rough use. I have always wanted to have one but
it's never been in our budget and will most likely never be.
On an un-related subject, I had just had a pulmonary blood clot and
was recovering nicely, and I mentioned to him that my O2 sat. had
been as low as 65% which I thought earned me some bragging rights for
survival. He countered with his experience that it runs about 55% on
the mountain.
More notes at end of this-
The transfer of amateur cameras & projectors to Singapore was
a major decision taken by the Rollei management in the seventies.
At the time the boss was Herr Peesel, followed by Herr Peter
Peperzak, then by Heinz Wehling.
At a time when all European and German companies manufacturing
amateur cameras had to close down (the most famous example was the
Zeiss-Ikon plant in Stuttgart closed down in 1972), the Rollei
decision can be considered as adventurous but if you compare with
the UK or France where almost everything photographic was destroyed
by the Japanese competition, the Rollei example, in a sense, is admirable.
It is always easy to criticize a corporate management afterwards.
Now this is part of the history of the European photo industry and
we can discuss it like historians.
Regarding the Rollei 35, I can say that the transfer of
manufacturing to Singapore was a real success. I'm still using
several Rollei 35-s TE and SE made in the 1980s in Singapore, the
cameras perform incredibly well both mechanically and optically.
They need the occasional Clean-Lube-Adjust procedure like for any
Compur shutter, but otherwise those Singapore-made cameras are,
IMHO, as reliable and fascinating as classical twin-lens rolleiflex
made in Braunschweig.
--
Emmanuel from France
Interesting thing about Singapore. HP transferred manufacturing AND
support of the 200LX palmtop, maybe even the 100LX, to Singapore and
they did a credible job until the product was discontinued. (I had
to upgrade to the 200 from the 100 because the serial port speed of
the 100LX was incredibly slow and the engineers at HP told me it
would never get better). I was using the computer, at that time, to
download data at clients sites for conversion from Unix to other
OS's. I had all of 10 MB but that was sufficient. Now these little
jobs can take 1 Gb with a third party driver, even though they are
all DOS-based.
DAW
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