This bad boy, had been on my “cameras to own bucket list” for quite some time, and I finally bought one after selling a bunch of other cameras, July last year. And man I haven’t regretted it a second. This is so awesome and fitted with a super sharp lens.

I bought a pretty beat up copy to save me some money, because I don’t need one in mint condition, I rather save a little cash. But this one was more beat up than I thought, the distance scale is almost gone, and I even had to glue it together in a few spots. But still it’s working like a charm and I as long as it does that I really don’t mind about the looks.

The camera is huge – 20cm wide, 11cm high and 14cm deep (with the lens) – but the weight is not as bad as one might think, it comes in at around 1500 grams. The weight is just right, it feels good in your hands when you are using it.
The lens is a 90mm f3.5 – there is also a wide version with a 65mm f5.6 lens – It makes 6×9 negatives on /220 film, that is super nice, only downside is that you only get 8 frames (16 on a 220 roll) worth of imagery on a roll of film.

I’m totally in love with this camera, it’s perfect in every way…. almost.

Because there is one major downside with this camera, and that’s the T mode option. Not that there is a T mode option, that’s actually rather nice.
But it’s how you use the T mode, that isn’t well-thought-out.
T-mode – for those of you who don’t know how that works – is almost the same as B-mode that many cameras has, the difference is that in B-mode you have to hold the shutter down for the length of your exposure, in T-mode you press the shutter, the camera stays “open” until you press the shutter again. That is on all other cameras, the GW690III lets you trigger the shutter, you can even use a shutter cable, but when you wanna end your exposure, you can’t do it by pressing the shutter. There are two ways of shutting the shutter, one is to wind the film on the film winder, the other is to change the shutter speed.

I don’t know why that made it that way, it is totally useless. The idea with T-mode is to make long exposures and not shake the camera in the process.
I solve the problem by using a shutter cable and the putting something dark – or just my hand – in front of the lens once I’m done, and then wind the film to close the shutter.

I’m on roll no. 19, I know with only 8 pops a film, you’re eating them up pretty fast. But still it’s a lot of film in my world, on such a short time. And that means only one thing – I like this camera!
And I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone, how wants a bad ass camera, and don’t mind the size.

Useful links

  • The Looks
  • The Quality
  • The Handling
  • The Price
  • The Output
5

In short!

A bucket list camera for a while, and it totally lived up to my expectations.

Pros

  • Super sharp lens.
  • All manual camera.
  • No batteries.
  • Good rangefinder viewer.

Cons

  • Huge!
  • T mode sucks.

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