A Folding Bed 6x9 for the Road
Veijo Vilva
Zeiss Ikon Cocarette 517/2 with Tessar 4.5/105 in Compur (1930)
This camera, like most folding bed cameras, has rack focusing instead of front cell focusing. The radial focusing lever at the right side of the baseboard moves the lens-shutter combination as a unit along the rails. There is a knob for a 5mm raise/fall of the lens. The red thing above the lens is a spirit level which helps keep the camera more or less horizontal for landscape shots. The wire frame viewfinder is shown in the transport position.
This camera is surprisingly pocketable. The body is quite thin, it measures 171mm x 82mm x 37mm, thinner even than my folding 35mm Balda Jubilette, and there are practically no disturbingly protruding, delicate parts. However, a folding bed camera isn't quite as fast and simple to open or close as a spring camera, e.g. an Ikonta or a Nettar. The rising front is nice to have, but a cross front would be more useful for landscape shots. The frame size is 58mm x 90mm, which is about 10% wider than usual along the longer dimension.
The back of the camera doesn't open. There is, however, a round, removable
cover
to facilitate cleaning the lens. The pull-out "eye-piece" of the sports
finder is fixed to
the cover, the upper end pointing downwards in the photo, and the
sheath serves
as a handle when removing the cover. The red window and its cover are rectangular.
The whole film handling mechanism slides out of the camera. There is no
pressure plate, but the film slides in guide slots along the whole width of
the mask frame so there shouldn't be any problems with film flatness.
The tripod mounting hole under the folding plate is inconveniently situated
and makes it well nigh impossible to use a standard quick release plate.
A Couple of Photos Taken with my Cocarette
I scanned the negatives with an Epson 4990 + VueScan at 2400 dpi, and cropped the original scans of about 8330x5270 pixels to 7620x5080 pixels (38 Mpixels) for printing at 254 dpi. Regrettably, the negatives weren't quite flat in the holder during the scanning.
A View from Helsinki, Finland:
Below is a crop from the original 7620x5080 image scaled so that the dimensions
when viewed
on a typical 17" CRT screen are roughly the same as on a 30" x 20" print:
A view from Tallinn, Estonia:
(a 1024x768 wallpaper) (3456x2193, 8 Mpixels, 1.7Mb, refocused, contrast added)
(5080x3390, 17 Mpixels, 4.4Mb)
Below is a crop from the original 7620x5080 image scaled so that the dimensions
when viewed
on a typical 17" CRT screen are roughly the same as on a 30" x 20" print:
The print is, of course, sharper and more detailed:
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A crop from the original 7620x5080 image (no USM), the whole image would be about 94" (240 cm) wide at screen resolution. |
A corresponding crop bicubic upsampled from the above downsampled crop |
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