What is...

[Don Simon]

my most expensive camera was a Minolta Autocord

And worth every penny!

 

[Torus34]

Up-date;

The Minolta, 50 years old, is still alive and well. Ran some film through it a couple of months ago. I had to re-stitch the case recently.

I wonder how many of today's rigs will still be working 50 years after their date of manufacture.

 

[Mitica100]

I wonder how many of today's rigs will still be working 50 years after their date of manufacture.

Oh, quite a few! I have a few cameras from around 1911 that are still immaculate and still work perfectly. Of course, they are much simpler, mechanically speaking. I also shoot with a 1939 Leica RF, still in great shape after almost 70 years of service. There were no plastic materials then to substitute for the metal. Up to around 1965-1970, a lot of cameras were made to last, save for the amateur level (bakelite body, meniscus lens, simple shutter). Now it's a different story, your dig. camera gets 'updating' every 3-5 years, like the computers, newer models with more bells and whistles. Sometimes we forget that photographers like Cartier Bresson et al used to work with RFs and much-simpler-than-today cameras.

Oops... didn't mean to start something else here...

 

[mysteryscribe]

oh hell twist the thread everybody else does. I went out to shoot a camera today with a 1920 something lens and realized that it was going to outlast me by decades.

 

[Don Simon]

I'm not so sure today's cameras will last as long. It's not so much the build quality or materials that concern me, but simply the way the work, i.e. very few are designed to be fully mechanical, they're mostly electronic. To put it another way... there's more to go wrong!

 

[terri]

I'm not so sure today's cameras will last as long. It's not so much the build quality or materials that concern me, but simply the way the work, i.e. very few are designed to be fully mechanical, they're mostly electronic. To put it another way... there's more to go wrong!

Exactly. Even sticking to film cams, I would wager my Mamiya 1000S will still be going strong long after my Pentax MZ-S sputters out. The Mamiya seems little more than a box camera, just with great optics and the ability to accept a metered prism viewfinder. It's a tank! I fell for it for that very reason.

 

[markc]

My most expensive was the 10D. For film, it was the EOS-5. Most of cameras have been rather cheap though, like trading my old Palm Pilot Personal for a YashicaMat EM, or $10 for an Agfa Brick, $12 for an Agfa Clack, a Holga, etc.