The Ricoh 500 Returns !

I bought my Ricoh 500 about fifteen years ago.  Nine years ago I finally got around to shooting a roll of film in the camera.  Another roll went through the Ricoh a year later.  The day before yesterday I retrieved the camera from the back of a drawer and decided it was time to use it again.  A brief inspection showed me that some issues would need to be resolved before I could make more pictures with the Ricoh.

The shutter was sticky below 1/200, apparently because of some congealed grease and dirt on the shutter blades.   Fortunately, it is pretty easy to get at the front of the shutter blades by removing the forward aluminum ring on the lens.  There are three little screws that just need to be loosened, giving access to the front lens group.  Unscrewing the front lens reveals the surface of the shutter blades.

I gently scrubbed the shutter blades with a q-tip soaked in electrical contact cleaner until I could see no more black stains on the surface.  It would have been nice to get at the back of the shutter blades as well, but that would require disassembling the whole lens and shutter.  So, after checking the infinity focus I reassembled everything and, after letting the shutter dry over night,  it seemed to be working fine at all speeds the next morning.

I loaded some film in the camera and discovered that there was one more problem to be resolved.  When I worked the advance lever on the bottom of the camera, the film advanced properly to the next frame, but a second small crank on the lever was needed to get the shutter to cock.  I then removed the back of the camera to examine the advance mechanism to see if there was some way to adjust it so that the film advance and shutter cocking could be accomplished with a single throw of the advance lever.

When the advance lever is cranked, the spring washer in the center of the picture rotates with the raised edge engaging the gear train in the camera body to advance the film by one frame and cock the shutter at the end of the process.  Removing the large screw in the middle of the washer allows removal of the washer which is connected to a toothed gear which rotates as the lever is cranked.  Since it was clear that the gear was just not traveling far enough to complete the process, the obvious thing to try was to reposition the gear slightly.  I did that by very slightly advancing the lever which moved the gear one or two teeth, and I then replaced the washer and gear and tightened down the screw.  That did get the advance working properly with a single throw.

So, time for the real test.  Thanks to the gift of a pile of old film from a friend I had a roll of ten-year-expired Agfa APX 100 to serve as my camera-testing guinea pig.  I managed to expose all 36 frames on a walk into Albuquerque's Old Town, shooting at two stops below box speed to compensate for the film's age.  Back home with the completed roll of film I mixed up a batch of Rodinal at 1:100 dilution and developed the APX 100 semi-stand for forty-five minutes.  I was pleased to see that the camera had worked nearly perfectly, with just a small bit of variation in frame spacing, possibly due to worn teeth on the brass gears.

I cannot make any judgments about the quality of the old APX 100 due to the film's age when I got it; I was just pleased it helped accomplish the job I gave it.  I'm curious, however, about how a fresh roll of the new APX 100 might perform, so maybe I'll try that for my next roll through the Ricoh 500.

I mentioned in my last two posts about the Ricoh 500 that the reason it took me so long to get started using the camera was that I had bought into some allegations about the quality of the Ricomat 4.5cm/f2.8 lens that I had seen on the net.  In fact, it is a very sharp 5-element design, and the Seikosha shutter is accurate and reliable, and one of the quietest leaf shutters I have in my collection.  The design, construction and materials throughout the camera are all first-rate.

In reviewing information about the Ricoh 500 available on the net I came across a 2002 blog post that I believe was the origin of often repeated misjudgments about the quality of the camera's lens.  The  blog author was Karen Nakamura; she was a good writer and a generally good source of information on old film cameras at the time when I was just getting started again with them.  In the case of the Ricoh 500, however, I think she was way off the mark.  Here is what she had to say about the Ricomat lens:

"Unfortunately, while the camera is nice to handle, the optics are clearly from the consumer end of the 1950s, very low in contrast. Nothing to write home about."

and

"The little known successor to the Ricoh 500 is the Ricoh 519. The same camera with a much better 45mm f/1.9 lens. I had never heard of it..."

Looking at the whole blog post, however, those damning judgments are unsupported.  There are no pictures shown from the camera.  There is no indication that the author had shot more than one roll of film before posting her opinions, nor did she apparently examine the camera closely to see if there were any correctible problems with the lens or shutter.  Furthermore, she accepted the idea that the Ricoh 519 had a "much better" lens based on the experience of someone who apparently had no basis for comparing the two cameras.

So, some lessons to take away:

• A lot of opinions one finds on the web about old film cameras are based on samples of one and are in reference to complex old machines with unknown histories.
• Ideas get propagated on the web with great ease, be they right or wrong.
• Bad information on the web has a long life.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of listings on ebay for the Ricoh 500.  Prices are all over the map, but examples of the camera can often be found going for as little as $20.  Take it from me; it's a bargain.