It's Pink! Gearing Up For The Crappy Commie Camera Party (Part V): The Beirette SL 100N

It's Pink! Gearing Up For The Crappy Commie Camera Party (Part V): The Beirette SL 100N

The Beirette SL 100 was originally launched by the Karl Pouva KG company of Dresden in 1972 as the Pouva Start SL 100. When the company became the state-owned Kamerafabrik Freital, the name was changed to the Beirette SL 100. In 1987, the Beirette SL 100N was introduced in a range of different colours, and I was delighted to find this lovely version in pink for not very much money. 

The camera is made almost entirely of plastic, with a cup-like lens cap permanently attached to the camera with an plastic strip. It's a simple camera, with a Chromar 50mm lens, and zone focusing of 1—3m, 3—8m, and 8m to infinity marked with little icons on the lens. The shutter has two speeds of 1/30s (flash) and 1/125s (for 'sunny'  conditions), plus B, and a fixed aperture of f11.

The Beirette SL 100N has a countdown frame counter. After loading a film, the counter is set to 0 with the wheel on the rear of the camera. The film is advanced until '12' is visible and the camera is then ready to use. After taking the last frame (number 1), the film is advanced three more times before opening the camera and unloading the film.

Naturally, I was keen to see how the camera performed, so I loaded the SL100N with an SL canister of probably slightly expired Lomography 100 film. I say 'slightly expired' because the film was supplied loose so there was no packaging with any film stock details on it. In the event, the exposure was ... reasonable. Some of the images came out really well, though I felt that the negatives were quite 'thin', but the wind-on mechanism was rubbish with poor frame-spacing and far too many overlapping images. 

There were also a lot of light leaks, though this was intermittent, and I reckon that this because of the poor quality of the recyclable 35mm cassette that I used to transfer the film from the Rapid canister rather than the camera. The Beirette is really light hungry, and will benefit from using a much faster film, even on sunny days. Despite these faults, I really like the Beirette and will certainly try it out again, though probably not before the end of the Crappy Commie Camera Party. I've posted the whole roll in an album (https://www.flickr.com/gp/147583812@N06/G2FmfMRHrV) on my Flickr, light leaks and all, if you want to see the rest of the images.

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#Pouva, #Rapid, #AgfaRapid, #Beirette, #Canister, #SLFilm, #Vintage, #Experimental, #Redscale, #HarmanPhoenix, #HarmanRed, ##CrappyCommieCameraParty, ##ShittyCameraChallenge,