Your First Purchase?

[sionnac]

It was a Falcon Miniature Deluxe bakelite camera, 127, fixed 50 mm lens, which I still use often...thrift shop, $3.00. I have a Zeiss Box Tengor, an Ansco Shur-Flash, a Rollei 35, Yashica-Mat, Polaroid Land Camera 350, and an Olympus Ecru in rotation too, most acquired in the same fashion.

[eagleowl]

Mine was a Mamiya C33 and Meopta opemus enlarger(both about the same age as me! )which I bought off a friend for almost nothing!!
I bought them because I wanted to get into medium format,but didn't have the money to buy a new 645.
I like the camera-although I don't have the time to use it at the moment.

[Bob Carnie]

I recently bought a photgravure, The Country Doctor, by Eugene Smith,
It was for a wonderful friend of mine who has stuck with me through thick and thin, my own country doctor

[argus]

I recently bought a Voigtlander Brillant, circa 1933 (or so the seller said). I still haven't figured out if it works, or how to get it to.

Yup. same over here. It's fully functional.

G

[Thomas Wagner]

4x5 Kodak printing frame. The store did not know what it was, so I bought it as a picture frame for 25 cents. I still have it around here somewhere, some 25+ years later.

Tom

[eric]

Probably a lantern slide of a scene of a rice paddy in the Phillipines. My wife is Filipino, and we liked it. I've tried to dupe and print it, but it is extremely contrasty.

Next time I go to the Philippines, I'll take a picture of a rice paddy in Kodachrome 64 (1 roll left in my freezer). It'll be up to you though to figure out how to process it

Don't eat too much adobo man, that'll kill 'ya

[Changeling1]

I purchased an old Norwood Director lightmeter for $10 and collection grew to about 100 vintage light meters of all makes. Most of these old meters still work (if they were kept in the dark) and require no batteries. The Ikophots and Directors and others have a wonderful jewel-like quality to them.

[Donald Qualls]

My first antique camera-related purchase was an Exa II SLR, which I bought in about 1972-1973 time frame with money earned mowing the lawn and painting the house. At that time, the camera was close to 30 years old ("Germany, USSR occupied" stamped on the bottom puts it shortly post-War).

The first one in a recent time frame was my Kawee Camera, the US sale version of a KW Patent Etui 9x12 cm plate camera. Vintage about 1935, it was also responsible for starting me back into photography on a more serious basis than shooting a roll over the course of a year and letting Costco process it. It's still in my bag, been there just over three years now, 100% functional.

Er, wait, you guys are talking about cameras to dust, or cameras to use?

[Ole]

My first "antique" camera was a Zeiss Ikon folder, unless you count the first "real" camera I used - my father's Welta Welti.

I sold the Zeiss Ikon when I bought an old Technika, then decided I missed it so I bought a few more

But my first really antique camera is the 18x24cm plate camera - German made after the English style, ca. 1910.

[David H. Bebbington]

"Vintage" is an interesting term - recently I see (presumably young) advertisers offering "vintage" equipment from the 1950s which I remember as new. On that basis my first purchase was a Kodak Junior II 8-on-620 camera, bought with my (10th) birthday money in 1959 - my first new camera, which cost 32/6d or £1.62 1/2. Previously I had had to struggle with various elderly folders which, as they were from the 1920s, were truly vintage - at the time, they were just cheap old cameras.

The first camera I bought expressly as an antique was a 5 x 7.5" wooden view camera by T. Algate of Plymouth, England, date approx. 1880. This cost about £100 30 years ago, I would doubt if it's worth a great deal more now, so not a great investment from a financial point of view, but I've had it on display everywhere I've lived in the intervening time and had pleasure looking at it.