advice on Horizon Perfekt

Don’t be stupid, go with a 202 or 203.

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Fave camera i own.
it’s got a plastic lens, your not gonna get razor shots kinda lomo feel i suppose. No light meter.

they make pics like this:

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what do you wanna know?

cool Con, I’m sorry for the delayed response, there’s no real difference between this and the perfekt is it? My real issue is about the lens distortion, but there’s none in your pick. best, Miguel

stupid, do you have one? what’s your experience with them? best, Miguel

Yeah, I have some stupid experience with Horizon and Widelux. Problems are many. You asked about distortion. Plenty of it. Because the film plane is an arc, all lines parallel to the camera body will appear curved. Pointing the camera at a wall parallel to the body will make the wall look like it’s bulging toward the camera, in the middle. Pointing the camera at the sun will result in vertical banding glare because the shutter is a moving vertical slit. Pointing the camera up or down will curve the horizon up and down. Because the lens rotates during exposure, moving the camera during exposure will result in bands of blurred motion. Check out Jeff Bridges work to see what I mean. Any problems with the internal gears - meaning sloppiness on operator’s part when cocking or changing shutter speeds and thereby stripping the gears - will result in vertical banding (you can see one band in Con’s image above, a dark thin vertical line visible just where the rock meets the water. The lenses have fixed focus which is not identical on every body, some are focused closer than others, and can only be re-focused by a mechanic. This makes for out of focus portraits, unless the lens is stopped way down. Since the resulting film frame is 1 1/2 as long as a regular 35mm frame, special negative holder is necessary for printing, and so is a medium format enlarging lens. Slide mounts for panoramic slides are very hard to find and outrageously expensive. Bottom line, a rewarding but frustrating instrument not meant for everyone.

jaysus Stupid, that’s a comprehensive lowdown on the camera. Thanks. Though you may want to revise your name.

Three main things to look out for when using as far as i’m concerned. 1) like stupid says, keep it level for the horizon otherwise everything looks very very off, there’s a handy bubble level visible through the viewfinder that helps a lot. 2) wind film on carefully otherwise you get fall off before the frame’s border, you can see that to the right of mine above. 3) careful for flare, the moving lens will pick it up and leave a flared box somewhere in frame. looks odd again.

I think i scanned the above on my horrendous Canonscan 9900f, i made my own frame that sat in the 120 plastic holder. It’s a pain, but all scanning is. If you have a 35mm scanner there’s no reason you shouldnt be able to stitch scans together. At the moment i’ve got a lab that do 13×18cm prints (with black above and below when i process them so it suits. It’s a cheap fun camera and perhaps not the best if you want utter crispness. Sooo much though. Lomo do something hysterically similiar too.

thanks Con and Stupid, I guess it’s not what I’m looking for, I’m glad i asked before buying one, best, Miguel

you get a lot of surprised looks ;-)

Nice shots Alex, I’ve just picked up a Perfekt myself and so will be busy making some shots

cheers

PS – I thought it was a glass lens on the Perfekt? plastic body of course…