Votar Flex

Mos6502 · Joined: 20 Jun 2011 Posts: 960 Location: Austin

I'm pretty certain it is identical to the Halina Prefect, except that it has a matte focus screen instead of a brilliant finder. Although the focus is fixed, you can still tell from the screen when you are too close to objects.

Judging from pictures on flickr, I can expect serious vignetting from this thing. The lens is a "double meniscus". It's a two element lens, with symmetrically placed elements, so at least they were making an effort to correct distortion.

The body seems to have been copied from the Ricohflex. It has the little feet on the bottom, the weird back latch, and the insides pull out just like the Ricohflex... I think the font on the name plate might even be the same!

Made in Hong Kong - of course. Anybody used one of these or a Halina Prefect?

scsambrook · Expire: 2011-11-18

It certainly looks like the Halina Prefect. I sold the occasional Prefect back in the 1960s but it was never popular. There was another, more expensive variant, with geared-together viewing and taking lenses that let it work as a "real" twin lens reflex (TLR). We sold more of those, but the market for TLRs was very much for better quality ones and the least costly Yashicas and Ricohs weren't that much more costly. And there were lots of used ones as well.