[rollei_list] Re: [rolleiusers] Argomania

Other cameras you neglected to mention are the Mercury single frame (half frame) camera and the Buccaneera conventional 35mm camera. My brother owned a Buccaneer which he bought from a company situated on 23rd St in Manhattan. One of the owners  of the company that made these 2 cameras was a cousin by marriage. His son, Dr. Charles Kelman, a second cousin of mine, invented the cryosurgery technique for removing cataracts using a small opening and replacing the lens at the same time. As you can guess....sight was saved for millions of people with the use of this technique.  

 

Needless to say, he made lots of money.

 

Ed Meyers

 

-------------- Original message from Javier Perez <summarex@xxxxxxxxxxx>: --------------

Yup
That pretty much sez it all. I like to think that without Argus's ability to dump truly affordable 35mm cameras on the market we might not have had 35mm as the dominant format. Perhaps 126 would have won out or a totally new film format might have been created.
Javier

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From: azak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: [rolleiusers] Argomania
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:56:53 -0500
To: rolleiusers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Almost every photographer, amateur or professional who came up during the early to mid-1950s has at least some acquaintance with the Argus C series, mainly C3, the most successful American-made 35 mm camera ever.  It was an ungainly monster, a clunker to carry, clumsy and slow in use (I could work a Speed Graphic faster), fitted with a mediocre lens and unreliable rangefinder.  Although the optics were interchangeable with wide and tele options, few owners bothered with them.  It was a real project to change lenses, especially difficult to accomplish without a surface to work on. 

Despite all, it was a triumph of merchandising; by the end of the '50s, more C3s had been sold in the US than all other makes combined, foreign or domestic.  There were US competitors, notably the Bolsey B and C models and the Kodak 35, both superior products, in my opinion.  Both, however, were available mostly in photo specialty shops, with ER case, flash, film, batteries and bulbs sold separately as was the custom in photographic sales then.  Argus, however, packaged C3s as complete kits, with all the above except film and available at a much wider variety of shops.  Some of the larger general merchandise stores had them on racks.  Also, ugly as the contraption was, many people were dazzled by the gears on its front, assuming this meant some kind of high tech (no speculation here, I encountered several people who expressed themselves so.) 

So ubiquitous was the C3 that, basically, I couldn't avoid owning a couple of the wretched things at different times and regretted each.  Still, a gazillion images were made with Argus Cs, many of them of historical note.  Even though instructed not to, the tail gunner on a B29 over Japan ( I don't remember which city) took the only still photo of an atomic bomb mission mushroom cloud with his personal Argus   Later, according to a magazine article I once read but memory no longer allows me to cite, that the first electron microscope image of a molecule was made with a lash-up involving a C3 body, which had been found on a beach by one of the scientists involved and hanged up on a garage wall until pressed into service for the project.

There were other Argus offerings.  Some sold moderately well, but none as phenomenally successful as the C3.  Despite that, the company was a troubled one, plagued with bad business decisions and worse luck.  In the end,  unable to upgrade and faced with superior Japanese competitors, the brick sunk the company.           

Allen Zak

On Jan 8, 2010, at 12:54 AM, Javier Perez wrote: