{"id":14585,"date":"2019-05-10T06:30:39","date_gmt":"2019-05-10T10:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/?p=14585"},"modified":"2019-05-09T19:12:23","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T23:12:23","slug":"a-marvel-of-swiss-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/a-marvel-of-swiss-engineering\/","title":{"rendered":"a marvel of Swiss engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_14586\" style=\"width: 235px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-14586\" class=\"size-full wp-image-14586\" src=\"http:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Alpa-8b-sm.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"174\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-14586\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">ALPA 8b Camera (Photo courtesy of Foto-Hobby Rahn GmbH)<\/p><\/div>\n<p><strong>Toronto<\/strong>. In the early 1960s, my eye-sight in low light situations made my Exakta SLR harder and harder to focus. One of the cameras that caught my eye was the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dpreview.com\/forums\/post\/60935844\">ALPA<\/a>. Well made by a Swiss company, it has a 45 degree pentaprism <em>and<\/em> a rangefinder. It seemed like a great bridge from my Exakta to an easier to focus model. Ultimately I decided to go with a Leica M4 and never looked back.<\/p>\n<p>The Alpa series was made by Pignons S A, a Swiss maker of tiny precision parts for watches. In the 1930s they invited <a href=\"http:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/?p=14481\">Jacques Bolsky<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Alpa\">design<\/a> an SLR for them before he fled to America. Pignons never made lenses, but bought high quality optics for their cameras. Post war, the Alpa series was designed by <a href=\"http:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Alpa-mythe-et-renouveau.pdf\">Andr\u00e9 Cornut<\/a>. In all, fewer than 50,000 Alpa&#8217;s were thought to have been made. Well built and small numbers made the camera very attractive to collectors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Toronto. In the early 1960s, my eye-sight in low light situations made my Exakta SLR harder and harder to focus. One of the cameras that caught my eye was the ALPA. Well made by a Swiss company, it has a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/a-marvel-of-swiss-engineering\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[2432,2582,2581,2554],"class_list":["post-14585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-camera","tag-alpa","tag-kern","tag-pignons","tag-swiss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14585"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14591,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14585\/revisions\/14591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}