I have an old Kalart camera, No. 00068, with rangefinders on left and right sides. Am trying to find out more about it.

It is a compact model that folds down and has a Wollensak 135 mm lens.

I have the original manual. The camera is made by Kalart Co. in Stamford, CT.

I have never had one in my hands, but McKeown's says it was made from '48~'53, 3X4 only, and supposedly with a 127 Raptar standard. If yours has a 135 then either someone specified that FL when they bought the camera, which was not uncommon, or the lens was changed sometime during the life of the camera.

Check it out; if it is in good working order it ought to be fun to use.

The Kalart press camera was a very interesting design, indeed. I don't think a great many of them were produced; I probably saw four of them during some 30 years of hanging out in camera stores. (All had 127mm. lenses.)

I did get to handle one, a decade and a half ago. The rangefinder-viewfinder optics are awesome -- I've never seen anything like it. I liked the "ergonomics" a lot, and it is a very attractive camera.

The practical difficulty is that it has a (more or less) classic spring back, and you'd have to rebuild it to take rollfilm or Polaroid adapters.

The factory back is unusual in that it is equipped with a switch to detect whether you've pulled the darkslide -- it won't let you trip the shutter if you haven't. This is part of an "Electric Brain" that controls a built-in solenoid shutter release. It seems likely to me that this feature influenced the design of Graflex's "Super" models.

Follow the link below for a nice article on the Kalart Press Camera.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/jolommencam/

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: tsgrimm on 2005-10-18 21:56 ]</font>

There is a KalartII on ePay right now.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7555777454&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1