The other day I recieved my new old camera: A Revue 400 SE!
It’s a rangefinder camera with full aperture automation, which means I can set a shutter speed and ISO and the camera will chose the aperture.
The viewfinder shows a small square in which two images are shows that need to be aligned in order to focus correctly – similar to how most SLRs work, but not quite the same.
The shutter is super quite, it’s just a tiny click sound, and the camera feels very well build and heavy in the hand. It’s overall a nice shooting experience.
You may wonder what kind of camera brand “Revue” is. Revue was the in-house brand of a German mailorder company called Foto-Quelle. They sold rebranded cameras from various vendors on the German market; Most Revue cameras were build by Cosina and Chinon but some were manufactured by Mamiya, Konica, or Fujica. You can find more about these camera on the camera-wiki.
So what is the Revue 400 SE? Well, it’s not so easy. Depending on where and who you ask, but the camera is very similar to the Konica Auto S3, Minolta Hi-Matic 7sII – and apparently all of these were build by Cosina, so it’s likely they’re all the same.
The Minolta Hi-Matic 7sii has the advantage of manual aperture control, so if money is not the deciding factor it’s probably the better choice.
After shooting a roll of Kentmere Pan 100 I figured out that the cameras aperture control isn’t working. It always shoots at f/1.7, which is evident in the images all being blurry.
I’ll see what can be done, I contacted a repair store but I doubt it’ll be worth it as I paid 50€ for the camera and I already found another film tested one on eBay for 100€.
I guess I’ll attempt a DIY repair or resell it for parts.
Here’s a handful of images I got out of the first try.
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