In high school, I had a Yashica 6×6 and a Minolta 35mm. And while they were good for their time, my high school had a Rollei Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) for use of the photo group, and I just had to upgrade and get one of my own after using it.

My father bought me a used Rollei 3.5 for high school graduation and I held onto it and used it for nearly 40 years. If you want the complete list of cameras I owned, along with some pictures, I wrote about them a couple of years ago.

But in the 1990s, I started to see that my Rollei TLR images weren’t as sharp as they used to be. I felt that it would probably be too expensive to repair and sold it. Then I put together (quite) a bit more money and bought a slightly used Rolleiflex 6008 Integral SLR along with a grip and an extra film back (shown at top of article).

It has an f/2.8 80 mm PQ Planar (Zeiss) lens with leaf shutter up to 1/1000 of a second (for PQS lenses, and 1/500 for PQ lenses.) PQ stands for Professional Quality. This model was made from 1995-2002, and I believe I bought mine around 1997-8. And unlike the venerable TLRs, this camera has a huge variety of interchangeable lenses made for it.

The reviews of this Rollei SLR were really positive and still are. The camera has shutter priority, aperture priority manual and fully automatic exposure settings. It also has several TTL metering settings: center weighted mullti-zone, 1% spot and multi-spot metering. And since the film advance is battery driven, you can take multiple exposures a half second apart. These features put it far ahead of the competing Hasselblad.

While the camera performed well optically, it was plagued by the terrible batteries that Rollei provided. They didn’t hold much charge or last that long, and new batteries, which were expensive, were no better. So, I put it away and concentrated on a series of Nikon digital cameras: D70, D80, D7200 and now a Z6.

Not long ago, I thought I might be able to sell that Rollei and get a TLR instead. Of course, I had to make sure it worked. But of course, both batteries were dead and no longer chargeable. There are now after-market replacement batteries available, some of which simply welded in new rechargeable AA cells in the original Rollei battery case. But, most of them required an expensive new charger. Finally, I found a replacement battery system complete with charger on eBay from a user with the id mignon1. It works flawlessly and comes with a plug-in charger so you can recharge the battery without removing it from the camera!

I didn’t need a darkroom!

So, I took a few rolls of film on my “new” Rollei and was simply astonished at what a great camera it still is. My first rolls were using black and white film: TMax-400, Ilford HP5+ (ISO 400) and FP4+ (ISO 125). I developed them in my basement darkroom, loading the film into the developing tank inside a big changing bag I bought from Adorama. This bag is 25” x 22” x 17”, so you have plenty of room to unroll 120 film and spool  it into your developing tank reel.

And, while I have a complete darkroom, it turns out that with a new Epson v600 scanner, I really never needed to fire up the Beseler enlarger. While the scanning software provided with the Epson scanner is perfectly adequate, you can get faster scans and a bit more flexibility by buying a copy of Silverfast. For black and white, it seems to manage resolution better, and it does a better job color rendering from color negatives than Epson scanning software does. The detail is amazing and the color quite stunning. I sent that roll to The Darkroom to develop the negatives, but did the scanning and printing here at home. It turns out you can also buy color C-41 developer kits quite cheaply, and there are only two baths rather than the old 5 or 6, so it is as simple as b/w processing.

Scanning

But does scanning do as good a job as analog enlargement? I ran some tests by printing out the same photo both ways, and could not see any difference at all! Scanning a 6×6 cm negative, gives you around a 100 megapixel scanned image: more than you’ll ever get from your digital camera, and the gray scales are identical as well. In examples below, the left hand image was scanned from the original negative, and right hand image was printed in the darkroom using Ilford Multigrade paper and a #3 contrast filter. They are essentially identical results even when printed at 8×10 inches.

(I will have to say that I can probably knock out 8×10 prints in the darkroom faster than going through all that scanning and printing, but photographic paper is way more expensive than printer paper, and I don’t have to wash out the trays afterwards.)

This Rollei SLR is built like a tank. Heavy, sturdy and well made and will probably last for many years. It does however, weigh nearly 5 lbs and the best way to carry it around is in a padded gadget bag that distributes the weight across your shoulders. I keep a tripod in my trunk, as well. If you are used to taking hundreds or thousands of shots a day, the Rollei makes you rethink your composition, since each roll has only 12 shots. You will find that every shot is likely to be a winner. Think of the Rollei as a more portable view camera that can get the high-resolution pictures you really wanted.

So I’m not selling my Rollei 6008! It’s the best “new” camera I ever bought!