My Pentacon Six TL medium format (120) film camera with my Carl Zeiss Jena 80mm f2.8.

Hands on: Pentacon Six TL

I received this bad boy (pictured above) a couple of weeks ago, and have fallen in love with it almost immediately. The Pentacon Six TL is my first medium format film camera, and is also my first East German manufactured camera.

According to the The Pentacon Six System homepage, this camera was manufactured in East Germany from the 1950s to 1990. Although it looks like a large SLR, which it technically is, it comes with a waist level viewfinder that is big, bright, and makes the world look better than reality at times.

At this stage, I haven’t run a roll of film through it, but I will shoot a roll of Kodak Portra 160 this week in order to test the accuracy of the camera’s shutter speeds.

I’m really excited to shoot with it, especially as I intend to do a lot more portrait work going forward. I know I’m going to love its 80mm f2.8 Carl Zeiss Jena Biometar lens.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *