Originally Posted by
mortensen
I bought my first LF cam in august, a 45n-1 - so I'm still very new to the whole thing.
Once locked, the camera feels very rigid. But personally, I don't find the front nor rear locking mechanism ideal. When screwing in the front standard, you have to lock it pretty tightly to make sure it doesn't swing a tiny bit, when, say, using rise and composing the image. As pointed out by numerous others in other threads, the scales that is supposed to make alignment of the back simple, is difficult to read in anything but bright light (at least for me, and I'm still very young with properly working eyes, haha). These issues only reflect the chosen design and can 'easily' be dealt with as long as you are patient and accurate, when setting up. The more I use the camera though (which is quite a lot recently), the more I miss locking/zero mechanisms, that would guarantee that the standards were parallel.
so... to make a long story short: The camera is rigid and precisely made (imho), but the design is very loose.
.. and the fresnel issue - just remove it and use the ground glass. When researching for a camera I was very keen on getting a good fresnel, but now, when it's gone, I really don't miss it. Unless you only have f8 lenses and only shoot night/twilight, I would just get rid of it. When the fresnel was in the wrong place (from the factory), all my shots taken below f16 with both my 90 and 210 were more or less ruined by focus shift. So unless you shoot strictly f22 and above, you will have issues, I think.
good luck with it all...
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