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Status: Failed treatment for L.B.A. and G.A.S,
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on Dec 27, 2019 17:42:35 GMT
Last Edit: Dec 27, 2019 17:49:09 GMT by lumiworx
I came across a real oddity and after a brief bit of research, it seems that this was the result of a commercial effort to create a medical 'system' camera. The base 'generic' platform could be paired with various accessories that were designed for a particular discipline of medicine. The attachments could be dental, ophthalmic or dermatological from what it shows in the manual pages available (link bellow), and I'd assume there were other parts intended for other uses. The company, Photo Eaze, was based in New York, but I see a lot of Russian looking 'brute engineering' clues from the battleship grey monstrosity of a frame. Apparently there were a few different bodies used over the life of the product line, with a Yashica FX-3, and an FX-3 2000 used in at least two of it's iterations. The one above shown for sale that I stumbled onto has a lens of some kind locked into the frame, with another one showing as a bellows version, using a Zenit/Helios 4-42 at the front. Not a very friendly price on this one though. These must have been extraordinarily heavy, since the entire base unit looks like it was bolted and welded together, and uses a pistol grip in the middle of the sandwich to aim it at the victim... err... patient.
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Group: Moderator
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Status: Long, long time Contax and Yashica user; glad to be here and hope to contribute.
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on Dec 27, 2019 19:40:26 GMT
Posted: Dec 27, 2019 19:40:26 GMT
What a fascinating find!
I wonder just how the price of the Photo Eaze dental camera compares with the DX-100 Dental/Medical lens plus a FX-3 Super 2000 back in 1989...(Yashica cost c£760)
I certainly wouldn't have wanted to see one of those coming at me in a dentist's chair! Effective - quite possibly; seriously scary - definitely!
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Group: Administrator
Post: 1,370 (301 liked)
Join date: February 2017
Status: Failed treatment for L.B.A. and G.A.S,
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on Dec 29, 2019 0:10:44 GMT
Posted: Dec 29, 2019 0:10:44 GMT
I tracked down a reference to a catalog by the company in the Smithsonian's 'Trade Literature' collection, but it doesn't give any clues on content, dates, or even the number of pages. There's a simple listing in the New York State Journal of Medicine from the January 1968 issue that mentions them as exhibitors at a symposium on the "Medical Aspects of Sports" in February of '68. That's pretty much the extent of what's online, other than a short Camera-Wiki article by the same author of the blog post, with a subset of the same photos. I wonder if there's anything coincidental about the original Oral Eye from Yashica (Based on the Electro 35) being released in 1968...? There's no official prices on anything I've seen, but there's mention in one of the brochure pages that it's "much more economically priced than others on the market". The brochure is undated, and has no details on what configuration it may have had so that there's a point of reference to compare with. There's one site page that may or may not show ( USSRPhoto) that shows a Kalimar SR200 body, and said the invoice included with it had a price of $399. It strikes me as strange that if the company was in business from at least 1968 until the mid 80's, that there's so little published on the web, and so few examples.
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Group: Administrator
Post: 1,370 (301 liked)
Join date: February 2017
Status: Failed treatment for L.B.A. and G.A.S,
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on Dec 29, 2019 0:22:43 GMT
Posted: Dec 29, 2019 0:22:43 GMT
One last tidbit... Their corporate address at some point in time was: 241 E 10th St, New York, NY. That put's them in lower Manhattan, near Noho and the East Village. Not exactly a dinky little low-rent industrial town in the middle of nowhere.
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on Dec 30, 2019 16:29:10 GMT
Posted: Dec 30, 2019 16:29:10 GMT
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