Nice little Tower Type-3 (or Type III) 35 mm rangefinder film camera from the early 1950s – made by Nicca Camera for the Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog. The build quality of the Tower branded cameras are no different from the quality of the Nicca camera as best as we can tell. It appears that Sears didn’t ask Nicca to lessen the quality like one might imagine – Sears was known for good value but not necessarily the best quality in our opinion.

By the way, these images were taken with our Sony Cyber-shot  (model DSC-W170) from 2008. It’s a basic point and shoot but sports a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens and 10.1 megapixels. It adds a nice “softness” to our studio shots especially of vintage gear and it’s fun (and simple) to use.

The Tower Type-3 (made by Nicca) is one of the best of the Japanese made Leica…

Vintage camera wish list item 101.

The Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., Fujicaflex 

フジカフレックス

Designed to incorporate the best features that were available in the medium format twin-lens reflex camera market, the Fujicaflex debuted in 1954 – at a very premium price, we might add. While surfing today, we stumbled upon this wonderful site from Fujifilm Europe. You can check it out here

It’s nice to see a large corporation like Fujifilm blog about some of the really cool cameras that helped make their company great. In another blog, they go on to talk about the amazing Fujipet from 1957.

For more about this wonderful camera, take a trip here too to see Mr. Yoshinobu Koyasu’s camera collection… it is not to be missed!

It’s certainly interesting to read (Fujifilm Europe’s blog) – the older posts that pay tribute to the cameras of their roots are so interesting.

Enjoy!

Chris

We’ll be the first to admit – not an exciting title or topic for a blog. It may even be a stretch for a blog named the ‘Yashica Pentamatic Fanatic’. But we feel compelled to share information about the Yashica Company, however slight and trivial, with our dear readers.

Yashica’s first factory was along the shores of beautiful Lake Suwa. As best as we can tell, the original location (from Yashica brochures) was Shimosuwa-machi, Suwa-gun, Nagano Prefecture. This was the industrial campus of Yashica and it grew over the years to occupy almost every square meter of the property.

Opened in 1956 along the shores of Lake Suwa in Nagano.

Different view of the same campus. Yashica was running out of room by the mid 1960s. 

By the early 1970s, Yashica converted the Katakana silk mill in the neighboring town of Okaya into its newest factory. We don’t have all…