I reach home base, the ultimate home base of my photography, the Argus C4.  I could have bagged one of these twenty or twenty-five years ago, and wonder why I didn’t.  Maybe I feared reality wouldn’t meet fantasy.  Maybe I needed time to become nostalgic.  Nonetheless and finally, last spring I won a C4 on an auction site, and I finally welcomed the time traveler into my home. 

The rush came when I unrolled the bubble wrap and pulled out the camera.  I had never seen one of these "in the flesh," but here it was:  the real thing, the clean lines and impressive lens I remembered from catalogue pictures.  I put it on my desk and studied it, imagining how this moment would have felt when I was ten.  That turned out to be beyond imagining:  Wordsworth was right about the splendor in the grass. 

I picked up the camera to deal with it in the here and now.  As I moved it around my hands, learning its heft and balance, testing the smooth metals and small countours, I passed through a moment of disappointment:  the bottom plate and its little latch were flimsy.  I was surprised:  the C4 was not a bargain-basement camera in its time.  However, when I slid the back off—it slides off like a Nikon F’s—I discovered that the rest of the back unit is strong metal.  Why Argus would make the bottom so thin and the lock lever so crude is a mystery.  I thumped a knuckle against the inner parts:  they were hard metal also, with baked-on black enamel.  Comforted, I replaced the back and kept exploring. 

There was a knob near my right thumb that advanced the film and cocked the shutter.  When I twisted the knob, I heard a squeaking like bedsprings in a brothel.  I flinched again.  I was also taken aback by the crude and cheap film counter:  But again the Argus redeemed itself—this time, with a smooth shutter release.  I’d describe its sound as more of a clank than a click, but it sounded positive and serious.  I tested the indicated speeds, which were 10, 25, 50, 100 and 300.  All sounded different, and all sounded right.  Pretty remarkable, I thought, for such an old shutter.  There was a B setting, also, and it did what B settings are supposed to do. 

I twisted the focusing ring.  Stiff.  Another negative.  Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised to find a bright viewfinder and a clearly visible and snappy rangefinder patch.  This is not the 20/10 vision of a Voigtlander Vito or Leica M3, but it is far and away better than the Kodak Retina or Voigtlander Prominent or many another 1950s eye-strainer.  Plus, the camera is designed so that you do not bring your fingers over an essential window. 

I do have two complaints about ergonomics.  As you twist the film advance, you scuff your fingers against the shutter release.  If you have large hands, you will not enjoy skinning your knuckles 36 times per roll.  The other complaint?  Rewinding is also a finger-killer.  The knurled rewind knob chews you up as you twist, twist, twist to rewind.  It seems like rewinding a mile of film.     

An owner's manual came along with this example of the C4, thank goodness:  I needed it for the unusual style of loading.  The C4 doesn’t baffle you in the way of a Leica M, but its loading drill is hardly intuitive.  I’m pretty good at following instruction books, so I got my film lodged in the C4 where it ought to be, and I headed out to shoot.  Conditions weren't great--it was gray and overcast--but I wanted to see what this machine would do. 

Now, shooting was fun.  The camera handles sweetly and views well.  Here is a shot from the first roll I exposed that day—taken on the Fifth Avenue side of the New York Public Library.  Yes, there's even a Starbucks there.  I find the color rendition and sharpness excellent; you can enlarge this to see how very good the resolution is.  Apparently, the money saved on the bottom plate and the frame counter went into the lens.  This Cintar lens has a speed of 2.8, which was quite respectable in 1954; its overall performance is several cuts above what I had expected.  Even wide open, it comes through for you.  Is it sensitive to flare?  Yes, but Argus recessed the lens so deeply in the barrel that you really don’t need a lens hood.  Adding one might help with the flare problem, but it also might cause vignetting.  I’m going to experiment with that.

I’d like to say that the camera and I are living happily ever after, but things didn’t work out that way.  After a few months, something went wrong with the film advance.  The shutter wouldn’t cock or release.  I got on the Web and discovered that the Achilles heel of the C4 is that advance mechanism:  it breaks readily, and there’s no fixing it.  The failure of the advance tells you that the most vital of those loud springs has squeaked its last.  End of camera.  No more c four. 

Disgruntled, I started watching the auctions again—this time with a jaded eye.  I finally spotted a C4 that had a really clean case and was described as “apparently working.”  I usually stay away from cameras about which the seller claims to know nothing; but in this instance, I decided to take a risk.  My winning bid was only $19.00, so what the hey. 

When the camera arrived, I thought I had a winner.  The focusing ring was easy to turn, and the viewfinder was even cleaner than the first camera’s.  It had those loud springs, to be sure, but the film advance was working flawlessly and I expected great things.  Wrong again.  When I got my test roll back from the lab, the evidence jumped out at me, shouting, "Rangefinder problem!"  I had nice colors, consistent exposure, and everything out of focus.  I had forewarning of this as I worked through the test roll:  the distances indicated on the rangefinder, when it seemed in focus, disagreed with the actual distances from camera to subject.  And not just a little bit.  I hoped that this meant nothing--Only the distance scale is off, I frantically rationalized--but it did mean something. 

Now a confession:  I have a third C4.  I had to have this one, just had to, because it's a late model with X sync.  It sits beside me, daring me to figure out what's wrong with it.  The film advance is okay and the shutter speeds sound correct, but there's that rangefinder....  The rangefinder on this X-sync model gives me correct numbers for distances, but it's loose and rough at the same time.  Hmm.   

So it'll  be another test roll.  Stay tuned for the exciting ending.  Will I give up my quest?  Will I combine the three cameras into one that works?  We'll see. 

Now, even setting aside my own experiences, I find the C4 a puzzling camera.  How did Argus see it?  I know what the C3 was all about.  I was around in the 1950s, and I remember the craze for shooting color slides and presenting “shows” at home with a screen and projector.  People enjoyed the large projected image and the bright colors, and didn’t worry about lens sharpness and resolution.  The C3 was an inexpensive ticket into that kind of show business, and it deserved to sell as spectacularly as it did.  And at the time, no one called it a brick or thought it ugly.  Its dials and wheels looked impressive; and besides, no one had a fixed idea of what a camera should look like.  Page through a 1950s camera catalogue and you’ll see a wild variety of brands and styles. 

The C4, on the other hand, gave you more than so-so slides; it produced negatives that you could really do something with.  And its bright viewfinder let you shoot what were called candids—the Leica sort of shots.  It further offered a handsome Art Deco style and a hot shoe.  Even so, it was not a middle-level camera like a Kodak Retina or one of the Voigtlanders.  It was in a niche between cheap and nice.  And get this:  Argus did not advertise the C4 on anything like the scale of the C3.  You’d have big color ads inviting you into “the world of color slides,” and the featured camera would always be the C3.  The C4 would be stuck into a corner like a footnote.  When the C4 had its own ad space, it was usually a modest b&w shot and a few words with a headline announcing “The World’s Most Distinguished 35mm Camera.”  It would sometimes be tied in to the pitch for color slides, but more often it was not.

Yet, despite such modest advertising, the C4 sold quite well.  Until I can get more information, I surmise that simple word-of-mouth promoted the C4--or that a lot of those C3 enthusiasts traded up.