Film format: 120 roll film
Approx. dates of manufacture: TBD
Approx. original price: $TBD
Approx. street value:$40
The internet has really been letting me down lately. I used to be able to dig up a lot of information with Google searches, but between this and another relic of the mid-20th century I've come up with only fragments of information. You would think I was studying bronze-age pottery.
Thank God for Mike Butkus who had the owner's manual on his website. After that I broke the logjam a little and found a blog post about it on Photography & Vintage Film Cameras. And there's a short, silent YouTube video of someone showing it off. But it's still under-documented.
I found this at a thrift store for $20, and since it looked clean and complete and was nothing like what I already have, I snapped it up before they could change their minds. For our purposes I'm going to break TLRs down into four tiers--the professional tier (Rolleiflex, Mamiya C series), the serious-amateur tier (Kodak Reflex), the amateur tier (Ricohflex, Anscoflex, Ciroflex), and the junk tier (Kodak Duoflex). I've got one or more representatives in all the tiers except the serious-amateur tier. Now I've got full representation.
So this is a Mamiyaflex II. Specifics are sparse but it appears to be from the early 1950s (I will try to nail that down if I still have a McKowen's); Mike at the Camera Blog linked above says it's a copy of the Kodak Reflex II, just as the first Mamiyaflex was a copy of the first Kodak Reflex. Since I don't have either of those I can't confirm or deny.
The camera has a true focusing twin-lens (as opposed to the junkers that really only had one focusing lens and a fixed-focus viewer), a 75mm ƒ/3.5 Setagaya Koki Sekor. I assume it's a triplet based on the aperture (I believe 4-element lenses were usually ƒ/2.8). I read somewhere that Sekor comes from the first two letters of both words and R being renzu, the Japanese word for lens.
The Merit shutter is interesting (to me), also from Sekor. Again I saw somewhere that Mamiya bought lenses and shutters from Sekor in the 1950s and then merged with them in the early 1960s. This Merit has two fractional speeds, 1/300th and 1/200th, then Bulb, then 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100 seconds, so if you love long exposures this camera is your new friend.
Mine came with a mostly intact leather never-ready case and 2/3rds of a crumbling lens cap that would be a great project if I ever get a 3-D printer.
I'll add more if I find anything else about it. Photograph soon when I have the time to do a decent job.
Camera manual: Orphan Cameras.com