My sweet german baby, Rollei-Poly

WHEW maybe the bougiest camera I own! Got very lucky on a marketplace listing and scored an incredible bargain on this guy, a broken rolleiflex baby, and a nice but gummed up ricoh diacord. Rollei-Poly came to me almost fully functional. Shutter basically working if slightly slow (as expected) Glass basically looked perfect, no oil on the shutter blades. Cosmetically great shape, and meter seems to be working just right. Only problem was a self timer that didn’t work. It would kinda seem to set, but then quickly snap back instead of delaying the exposure.

After some troubleshooting and disassembly (see here for further discussion), determined that the self timer was no good. The shutter in the rolleiflex 2.8 is a Compur MXV #0, but it uses the same self timer (and I think also delay escapement) as the #00. A helpful forum member mailed me a self timer, but being impatient, I pulled the timer out of a busted Retina IIIc that’s been sitting on my bench for a while waiting for attention. The timers are the same size and interchange perfectly. You don’t really need the self-timer to work to be able to fire the shutter, but you do need a self-timer in there, it has a hook that engages a little latch, without which the shutter will not fire correctly. Since the blades on mine were clean I didn’t split the shutter halves or remove the shutter from the body, I just pulled and cleaned the escapements and put everything back together.

I didn’t bother to document the repair really because learncamerarepair.com has an EXCELLENT service guide for the rolleiflex and a really good one for the compur shutter, strongly recommended, very helpful. Really all you need I think to do any maintenance on this thing.

K, but how is it?

Shall I breathlessly extoll how this is One Of The Greatest TLRs Of All Time? Frankly, aside from the fact that I got the self-timer working, it’s basically the same (lovely, luxurious, sexy) shooting experience as my Yashica-24 which is the predecessor of the 124/124G. It’s nice that the lens is one stop faster, but slightly annoying that all the accessories for the larger bay 3 bayonet are twice as expensive. I’m not sure if I could make a useful statement about the lens being “better” than the yashica’s lens in some way, but wow let me tell you what those rolleiflex negatives really pop. TONS of contrast, I was delightfully surprised even before I scanned the first roll at how much contrast came through on the negatives just looking at them coming out of the tank. I honestly can’t say if this is way more/better than the yashica, but really they look great. As sharp as you’d expect for fancy zeiss glass - at least as sharp as I’m going to ever need with my funky old DSLR scanning rig and no-larger-than-8x10 paper in the darkroom. Also it’s minor, but I love the little parallax compensating mask. I don’t think that was a “problem” for me not to have it on other TLRs, but it definitely makes me feel like a real fancy boy shooting it.

I don’t think I’d ever in a million years pay full ebay price for one of these, but it’s a pretty nice camera and I’ll definitely be keeping it since I got so lucky on it.

You’ll notice in the picture my flash setup, it’s a hacked-up bracket from a rolleiflash threaded into a cold shoe tripod mount flash adapter thingey. Make sure you get the rolleiflash for bay III (the bay II rolleiflashes are much more common and most listings don’t specify). The threaded end on the rolleiflash bracket is 3/8-16 threaded like tripods of yore, so you’ll either need an adapter (a 3/8 coupling nut, a 3/8-1/4 tripod adapter, and a short length of 1/4 threaded rod would do) or to drill and tap your cold shoe adapter out to 3/8 like I did. Seriously rollei, you’re gonna make the fanciest TLR you possibly can and you can’t slap an accessory shoe on the side? Another minor gripe about using this with flash is that the PC socket is recessed pretty deep in the special-because-its-rollei-and-all-accessories-must-be-special spring-clippy flash socket and some PC cords can’t push far enough in to make a solid connection.

Kinda missed the focus on my face because I was using the self timer, but great contrast even with indoor lighting.

Me having a crazy vertigo attack

Peak focus is really on the logs up front which look super crisp.