Shooting the Finetta IV D

Early on a Thursday morning, Albuquerque's Old Town was mostly deserted, with just me and my Finetta to appreciate the morning light.

I shot a roll of Fomapan 100 which I processed in HC-110, dilution B.  

These shots were mostly at f16 and 1/100.  The shutter release on the Finetta is a little rough, so it is important to pay attention to keeping the camera as steady as possible during exposure to get the most from the Finetar lens.

There is no auto-reset on the Finetta film counter.  Before you load your film you need to turn the Advance  knob to set the counter a couple stops ahead of the number one.  That is best done by pulling up and twisting the knob to hold it in the rewind position, making it easy to turn as needed to reach the starting point.  

The viewfinder is small on the Finetta, but seems bright enough.  The framing seems pretty accurate, and I did not encounter any problem with parallax in the close shots.  The frame spacing on rolls through the Finetta are a little variable from start to finish because the advance spindle seems to turn through an identical arc on each winding.  I did, however, get the full 24 frames from the roll with no over-laps.

I believe my Finetta dates from about 1950.  The company made several earlier and later models, and the last one was quite sophisticated with a motor wind, interchangeable lenses and a focal plane shutter.  While mine is a lot more basic in its feature set, it is still a very serviceable compact camera.

Uniquely Modest

The Finetta IV D, produced in Goslar, Germany in 1950, was a camera clearly designed to be an affordable  image maker which would make sharp pictures reliably throughout the life of a family. The bakelite and metal construction is solid, and the coated Finetar f4.5/43mm lens yields very respectable results.

I acquired my Finetta some years ago.  Nothing worked quite right on it when received, but I reset the infinity focus, cleaned the shutter and advance mechanism, and got it working well enough to shoot a single test roll.  The pictures I got were sharp enough, but not very interesting -- not the fault of the camera, of course.  So the camera was unjustly condemned to years on the shelf, and I only got back to it again today.

When I examined the camera again in preparation for using it, I found that the film rewind mechanism was not working right.  When you lift and turn the Advance knob on the right it is supposed to release the film spindle to turn freely so the film can be wound back into the cassette on the left.  It turned out that the little screw you can see at the lower right above had worked loose.  The result was that the bottom of the take-up spool was not getting above the brass lever assembly which prevents the spool from turning backward.  Tightening down the screw fixed the problem, and I loaded up a roll of Fomapan 100.

That little lever in the picture above flips down to hold the film cassette in place so you can slide the back on  without having the film fall on the floor, a simple but effective design feature that is typical of the camera's construction throughout.

Getting the back of the Finetta off and on again is a little counter-intuitive for most people today.  Like my little Ansco Panda, that knob on the camer's bottom plate is turned in a clockwise direction to open the back and counter-clockwise to close.  My wife tells me the letter indicators stand for Auf and Zu, which translate roughly as Open and Close.  Someone obviously took a screwdriver to the back of my Panda, trying to pry it open, and left some pretty ugly scars.  The Finetta did not suffer the same fate.  Perhaps the last owner was a German speaker.

Tomorrow: Actual pictures made with the Finetta IV D !!!

Finetta IV D

The Finetta is a simple, but full featured 35mm camera. While the name may sound vaguely Italian, the camera was made in Germany in about 1950 at the Finetta Werk in Goslar. Features of the camera include a bakelite body with fabric or leather covering, an f:4/43mm Finetar lens with stops to f22, shutter speeds from 1/25 to 1/100 plus "B", double-exposure prevention, combined shutter cocking and film advance, flash synch, and frame counter. The leaf shutter under the front plate has a construction similar to many old box cameras and early folders with sliding levers and a lobed cam.

A manual for the Finetta IVD is available on line at CJ's Classic Cameras.