Thursday, October 16, 2008

My Camera History, Part VI

In 1979, I mentioned to my friend Mike Tzougrakis that I wanted to get a small camera for Sandy, then my fiancée. After all, it just wouldn't do for her to keep using a Kodak 110 camera.

Mike said, "I have just what you need," and showed me a little Miranda rangefinder, which I ended up buying from him. I gave it to Sandy, and a short while after we were married, after I had sold all my other camera equipment, it became the only camera in our family for a while. By then I had gotten rid of the Minolta SLRs, finally, all my Leica equipment.

The Miranda Sensoret was acutally a nice little camera and served us well. Pretty spiffy, too - unlike the photo above, ours was a "professional black" model. For Sandy, it was great, since it had a programmed shutter, so other than focusing, there was nothing else to do. And focusing was easy with a good, clear coincident-image rangerfinder.

The little 38mm f/2.8 was sharp enough, and overall, the camera was a good performer. For it's time, it was more or less in the same league as the Konica C35 and Minolta Hi-Matic F - all good cameras. Interestingly, the Sensoret was the only rangefinder ever made by Miranda, a Japanese camera company that otherwise was born and died (1953-1978) making only SLRs

Most important to me, this is the camera that took most of the pictures of our first year with our first child, Leah, born in 1982.

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