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The guy at a garage sale in Toledo handed me a beat up Kodak and one line I still hear when I load film
I was digging through a cardboard box of old camera junk at a garage sale near Toledo about 3 weeks ago, mostly busted point and shoots with battery rot. This older guy running the sale watched me pass over a Kodak Retina for $15 and said something like, you keep looking for the clean ones, but the ones that got used are the ones that still work. I kind of brushed it off at the time and bought a different camera. Then I got home, and the one I picked had a frozen shutter, while the Retina was still sitting there in my head. I went back the next morning and he laughed and sold it to me for $10 since he remembered my face. Took it home, cleaned the lens with a microfiber and some breath, and the shutter fired smooth on the first try. He was right, that thing had clearly been carried around for decades and it was still kicking. So now I open every camera before I judge it by how it looks. Anybody else buy a beater that turned out to be the reliable one?
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harper_owens24d ago
Man, I have to disagree with the whole "used ones are the ones that work" rule. Shutter speed is the thing that dies on old cameras (that and light seals), and a beater that got carried around for 40 years has probably had its springs stretched out and its slow speeds dragging the whole time. I've bought plenty of "clean" ones that fired fine because nobody ever touched them (my grandfather's Minolta sat in a closet since 1978 and it's still dead on at 1/250). For every cool garage sale story there's ten guys on forums with a shelf of pretty cameras that turned out to be junk. You got lucky, that's all. Good deal on the Retina though.
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