Approx. dates of manufacture: 1945
Approx. original price: $75
Approx. street value: low
One of the strangest-looking cameras in my collection. Unlike the Fotron, which is simply a white elephant, this one just looks like an escapee from a mad scientist's lab.
Universal Camera Company (aka Univex) was a maker of cheap cameras. Just before World War II they went into the emerging 35mm market with their own offering, an all-metal camera they called the Mercury, which took a film pack. After the war they updated it and designed it for use with standard 35mm cartridges and called it the Mercury II.
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The Mercurys were unusual at the time for a couple of reasons. The first was its half-frame format, which was
unique at the time and wouldn't gain any real popularity until the 1960s (see the
Canon Demi S). The other is that used a special
shutter design that married two discs together: each disc had a hole; by turning one disc in respect to the other, a crescent opening could
be adjusted in size, and then the disc could be rotated to wipe across the imaging area. Because of this, the Mercurys
were able to get a top shutter speed of 1/1000th at a time when most mechanic shutters topped out around 1/200th—especially
on inexpensive cameras.
But that nifty disc shutter limited them to the half-frame format to keep the camera size down, and they still had to add that hump-back on the top of the camera, and the control knobs out front by the lens instead of on the top. The result was a bizarre looking camera even in an age that gave us the Argus C3.
But the post-war world wasn't interested. GIs stationed in Europe bought better German full-frame 35mm cameras and brought them home instead. And the Mercury II became a curiosity.
Mine is from a camera show or swap meet, I forget which.
Camera manual: Orphan Cameras.com