On 11-04-14 4:25 PM, John Francis wrote:
On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 02:54:49PM -0400, Bruce Walker wrote:
That was the favourite failure mode of my Praktica and drove me
nuts. Eventually I decided to always waste the 1st frame by doing
one extra advance to see if it was still winding. Better that than
waste an entire roll.
I guess I';m a little confused here.
On all the film cameras I owned you had to advance the film a couple
of frames after closing the back. I used to do this after turning
the "rewind" crank to pre-tension the film (which I generally did
while the camera back was still open).
That way it was very obvious if the film was advancing properly.
the ME had some little indicator to show the film was moving, IIRC,
but I never relied on that.
The same trick worked on later cameras with motorised film advance.
The issue with the Praktica (mine was an LTL, circa 1972 iirc) was that
the film sprocket grabbing mechanism would let go *after* you had done
the obligatory two advances after shutting the back. It just wasn't a
very good design. You would slip the leader under a lip and simply lay
the end above the takeup reel. Advancing the film two shutter-releases
was supposed to cause the takeup reel to snag the leader, but frequently
failed to. I read on a Praktica nostalgia site that many others
experienced this too.
The Praktica is built like a tank. Weighs like a tank; shakes like a
tank when you press the shutter; sounds like a tank, ... :-)
It's still in one piece and working, I'll give it that. But that's at
least partly because it has very low mileage on it. My wife, who
introduced me to Pentax, wouldn't touch it.
-bmw
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