First light with French made, Camex Ercsam GS 9.5mm camera c1947

You know as soon as you hold it, that this is a quality camera, and it becomes even more apparent when you look at the features, including 4 speeds, single shot and focusing down to 0.5m. And when you turn on the clockwork motor it purrs beautifully.

 It hadn't been used with film for many decades, but after a clean up it shone like new and was ready for a test:

The charger is unique to the Ercsam, and has a very clever design feature, which is that the back pressure plate is built into it:

I loaded about 12 feet of the expired Ferrania negative film into it and shot it in Old Hatfield, Hertfordshire.  

Developing, as usual, was done in a bucket of stock strength Perceptol, for 9 minutes + 10% as it was the second use of the developer.  

There was the weakest of winter sunshine, which mostly disappeared behind haze and cloud, but the lens is very fast, a Cinor C, f/1.9, so the 6 ASA film was just usable with the 1/32nd of a second shutter, and a fully open aperture. 

The first section, showing the pub, was shot at 32 frames per second, another section ( I forget which...) at 8th second, and the rest at standard 1/16th second. 

The final "talking head" test is me holding the camera at arm's length. I set the focus at its closest point, and luckily it turns out my arm is exactly 0.5m long so the focus is spot on. Everything  looks sharp, and this was with the most challenging of light conditions, so it will be interesting to see how it performs on a brighter day with smaller apertures. 

I did 2 versions of the Telecine, one more exposed than the other. The difference between the 2 is remarkable. The top part (with inverted and original frame) was exposed for a longer time when photographing with the DSLR in the telecine, the bottom part is the same frame, but exposed for less time. The cropped sections next to the frames show that the longer exposure gives a far sharper final image. I'm not really sure why:

The only small issue is that the camera stops working if you take more than 2 consecutive single shots. Again, I don't know why, but popping open the camera and moving the charger resets everything back to normal .

The video: