52 rolls, 52 cameras, 52 weeks

Finally, some results!

I collected my first set of pictures yesterday, having had the film developed and scanned by Harrison Cameras in Sheffield and I'm quite pleased with the results.

Week one of this project/madness saw me using a Ricoh KR-10 Super along with the standard Rikenon 50mm f/2 lens and some out of date Fujicolor C200 film. Although I've imported the scans into Lightroom the only editing I've done is a little straightening, slight cropping and a smidgeon of sharpening.

I'm quite taken by the Ricoh, the shutter release has a bit of a hair trigger and there's no auto-exposure lock but other than those tiny issues it's difficult to find fault with the camera. The standard 50mm lens seems pretty good too with only its minimum focusing distance of 0.6m (as opposed to the 0.45m of my Nikon AIS and Olympus OM lenses) letting it down a little.

Decision made…

A recent find was this Ricoh KR-10 Super, complete with Rikenon 50mm f/2 lens and a smart ever-ready case. A bit of a clean and some fresh batteries and it's ready to go.

Up until this the only Ricoh I'd ever used was the 2.3 megapixel RDC-5300 that I briefly owned in 2001 and beyond the fact that Ricoh SLRs use the Pentax PK lens mount I know very little about the brand.

Introduced in 1982 the KR-10 Super seems pretty standard for its time, centre-weighted metering, aperture priority automatic and manual, no bells, no whistles but there are a couple of features that I really like the look of.

The first thing that caught my eye was the focusing screen, it's nothing fancy, just a split-image spot in a microprism band but the split is diagonal not horizontal which makes focusing on subjects that don't have an obvious vertical line much easier.

Secondly this shutter speed dial show speeds from 16 to 1/1000 sec… That's right, 16 full seconds is the slowest manually selectable speed and as far as I'm aware that's quite unusual in a camera of this era.

Mike Butkus' orphan cameras.com has furnished me with a pdf copy of the instruction manual and I have a small supply of slightly out of date Fujicolor C200 film in the fridge so I'm ready for the off!