The Exakta is an absolutely cracking camera. Very well made, Lovely to handle. Its one of the most complete "System" cameras of the era (Infact the first System camera). You can get interchangable Viewfinders, Prisms, Focus screens. 1700+ lenses are availible for it, the Carl Zeiss lenses are very good, even today. Huge number of accessories. They're also very pretty. Is your Varex (Or VX in the states - long legal dispute with Argus resulted in the name change, and customs grinding off the Varex name) the one with the round nameplate with engraved name, or embossed? Or is it the ugly one with the straight nameplate)
I've got about 5 of them myself. One other advantage is that the mount is less common than say M42 / Nikon / Canon, so there are few digital converters, which means the dirty digital users aren't stealing our nice cheap lenses and putting on their spawn of satan cameras. (Unlike my Pentax K Mount
)
It seems they're more rare in America due to their east german communist origin (Although the VX IIA didn't suffer from poor quality as a result, it took about another 5-10 years for the quality to go down the pan). At the height of the cold war having a communist manufacturer camera seems to have made you "Unamerican" it seems.
If you have a lens for it, I'd recommend you check the shutter fires then check for pinholes on both shutters (Put it against a table light and look for stars). The likelyhood is a camera of its age (50 odd years) will have pinholes on the shutter if its not had a CLA or been extremely well looked after. After that check the stopdown mechanism on the lens works and your pretty much ready to shoot. The light seals are velvet rather than foam, so they don't deteriorate.
