Do all speed graphics have a shutter, or is it a removable/optional item?
Do all speed graphics have a shutter, or is it a removable/optional item?
No,
There were some made with and some made without, I assume your talking about the rear shutter? You can remove the parts of the curtain shutter, but there is really no need unless your trying to save weight.
Dave
Yes and no.
Triditionally a "Speed" Graphic had a focal plane shutter which had a maxium shutter speed of 1000 of a second which was much faster than leaf shutters which usually went up to 1/250th. Hence the designation "speed". "Speed" evolved to mean a camera with a focal plane shutter.
Then Graflex invent a leaf shutter that went up to 1/1000 of a second and introduced a "Super Speed Graphic" that didn't have a focal plane shutter as a perminate part of the camera. With that one exception, I think all "speed graphics" have a focal plane shutter.
Then you throw the Crown graphic into the mix, that was offered with and without the rear shutter, trying to follow the lines of the graphic cameras can become a very interesting trip.....I have also seen "speeds" without the rear shutter, and as far as I can tell, these were custom cameras that were ordered by specific photographers ....a great site to gather information about graphics is located at
http://www.graflex.org
There is some inaccurate information in the above posts. Speed Graphics and Graflex SLR's have the focal plane shutter. Crown Graphics do not, and rely on a shutter in the lens. The Super Graphic came later, and was an improved model w/o the focal-plane shutter. The Super Speed Graphic was a Super Graphic with the 1/000sec. leaf shutter in the lens- no focal plane shutter. All the details are at graflex.org.
Sorry Mark,
I own a crown/pacemaker that has a rear shutter, it is currently my user camera for 4x5, and rest assured, it does have a rear shutter. Now I don't know, perhaps the lens board holding slide was changed somewhere along the way to a crown slide and the speed slide was discarded..
The camera line up is at this link:
http://graflex.org/speed-graphic/graphic-models.html
Dave
Dave, I suspect that your camera suffered a lensboard slide swap as you suggested. The link you gave says categorically that Crowns don't have shutters and so does Graphic Graflex Photography.
Cheers,
Dan
If it's a Pacemaker model with rear shutter, it's a Pacemaker Speed. The Crown had a shallower body (and could thus accept about 15 mm shorter focal length lenses) specifically because it didn't have the focal plane shutter; it was the focal plane shutter (and accompanying differences in the body) that was the sole significant distinction between the Crown and Pacemaker Speed.
As Mark posted, the only model called a "Speed" that didn't have a focal plane shutter was the Super Speed, so called because of the 1/1000 leaf shutter (few of which are still operational, and without that shutter the camera is properly called a Super Graphic). No other model without focal plane shutter was ever sold as a Speed Graphic in the roughly fifty years from the original introduction of the "top-handle" Speed Graphic (the model with the small lens board) in 1928 until the Super tooling was sold to Toyo and the Graphic name finally dropped entirely.
If a contact print at arm's length is too small to see, you need a bigger camera. :D
Donald,
I already posted that the information I provided was not accurate..
Dave
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