Spotlight: Voigtlander Bessamatic Deluxe

 

While exploring St. Joseph, Michigan, I found this cute German Voigtlander Bessamatic Deluxe SLR tucked away below a table, hidden behind a bunch of junk, in a local antique shop. For only 38 bucks, I had to have it. But what film would I use? I was away on vacation. Luckily, I still had an emergency roll of expired TMax 100 stored away in my VW Beetle for just such an occasion. I loaded the camera up and started firing off frames. 

Released in 1962, the Bessamatic Deluxe is an enhanced version of Voigtlander's Bessamatic camera from a few years prior. One of the most notable improvements over the original is the inclusion of a full information viewfinder, which (for 1962) is a pretty lavish feature! The little protrusion between the "Voigtlander" and "Bessamatic" logos projects your current aperture and shutter speed settings into the viewfinder. Also viewable in the finder is a match-needle exposure meter that runs off selenium cells. I don't really trust 60-year-old selenium cells, so I used an external light meter for my exposures, but I could see how this in-camera meter was easy and convenient to use back in the day. 

The wheel on the left is how you change aperture... weird!

Adjusting the exposure settings on the Bessamatic Deluxe is pretty bizarre, and a bit of a chore. Twisting the ring around the lens will change both the aperture AND the shutter speed at the same time (to keep you at the same exposure value). To change only the aperture, you must twist a knurled wheel on top of the camera, beneath the film rewind knob (Huh?! What?!). There is NO way to independently change the shutter speed. So, my method was to first change the shutter to what I wanted (which would also change the aperture), and then adjust the aperture with the wheel on top of the camera. German engineering at its finest! 

One other strange thing about the camera has to do with the focusing. The Bessamatic Deluxe features a split image assist on its focusing screen, and around that split image is a small matte ring which shows the current focus of your lens. However, beyond that central split image and small ring, the image will always look in focus. You can be inches away from your subject with the lens set at infinity, and everything on the focusing screen will look totally sharp except for the small ring and split image in the very middle. I have never seen this before. It's disorienting at first, but once I was aware of how it worked, it didn't make any difference in the shooting experience, really. 

Here you can see that this little fox ornament is completely out of focus (judging from the central focusing aids), but the rest of the screen is totally clear. Also, note the nifty aperture/shutter window at the top

The mirror on the Bessamatic Deluxe is not instant-return, so the finder goes black once the shutter is released. You must re-cock the shutter before you're able to see anything through the finder again. I don't hate this, because I always know if the camera is ready to fire when I put my eye to the finder. 

Lenses on the Bessamatic Deluxe are interchangeable, but mine only came with a standard 50mm f/2.8 Color-Skopar, so that's all I got to use. On the days I used the camera it was pretty overcast, so I was forced to shoot wide open at f/2.8 for the majority of my exposures. I wasn't really impressed with the image quality, as a lot of my images came out very soft. Was this the fault of the lens? I'm not sure. Maybe it was the expired film I used, or maybe my camera is slightly out of alignment. Regardless, I'm not overly pleased with my results, but I got a few decent images out of the roll. Take a look!