This machine has a name like a twentieth-century passenger train and looks like a nineteenth-century locomotive.  It'll take you places, too. 

The Super Ikonta is another folding camera from the kingdom of Zeiss.  It looks somewhat like the Zeiss Maximar, but is 60 percent smaller.  It takes 120 film, and gives you 11 exposures per roll.  Yes, you read right:  eleven exposures.  The film advance and counting is fragile and quirky.  Even after twenty years, I don’t think I’ve found all the ways to mess it up.  And I’ve come to expect contact sheets with skipped, overlapped, and blank frames.  I wrote Zeiss about this once, and they advised me that the Super Ikonta was made when 120 film reels were fatter, so you have to put one layer of masking tape around each end of a modern takeup spool.  Also, they went on, you've got to advance the numeral 1 a bit past the red window when you are loading.  That helps, but I still screw it up sometimes.  Someone told me that the real way to solve the problem is to make sure the shutter is cocked before you begin loading.   I haven't tried that yet:  first I'm going to take it to the gypsies.   

Yet…yet…if you don’t want to carry a large camera but you still want MF; if you want precision focusing; if you want a great lens going for you, this is the baby.  I once took this camera for a family picnic, and I have to say I got the best family shots I’ve ever taken.  Maybe it was accidental:  you can barely see through the finder, and the design and weight compel camera shake.  Still…there’s something stimulating about the old thing, and the combination of that wonderful lens and a 6x6 cm piece of film can do great things.

My version of the Ikonta is the two-window model B pictured above.  I prefer this version to the one-window.  The viewfinder is dim enough without having a yellow patch in the middle of it. 

It's fun to open out the front of my Ikonta.  It opens with the same sound as the hood of a 1960 Pontiac.  Quieter, of course, but the same neat sound.  Many people have noticed this, and you hear it discussed at camera shows.   

 One warning:  these old Ikontas like to be used; and if neglected, will retaliate with sticky shutters.  They are not expensive to tune up, however, and they repay favors.