I'm settling on my Contax system for my limited 35mm needs, so some of my LTM items need to find a home where they'll get used. This trio is a very functional core outfit in LTM; it served as my main travel kit for several years with never a problem, acquiring mojo from three continents.
I'd prefer to sell the kit together; US$750 for the whole set, shipped in the US.
Bessa-R: Definitely a user-condition body, with significant wear showing at the corners (the worst corner is shown in the pictures), but as far as I can tell it's functionally perfect. The rangefinder has a very slight misalignment in the vertical direction only (pictured below; the circled area shows the offset between the two images of a single knob), which has never bothered me in use so I've never done anything about it.
75mm f/2.5 Color-Heliar: This is a seriously nice portrait lens, particularly good at taming contrasty light in my experience. Here we have the silver version, with its original hood and caps, and pretty much pristine with the exception of some slight wear on the mounting end. It's been discontinued in favor of the M-mount version and you don't see too many of them on the used market; there's a reason for that: they're good.
50mm f/2 Nikkor-H (a.k.a. "Nikkor-HC", but this is after they stopped using the "C" since all their lenses were coated): This lens is Nikon's version of the 6-element Sonnar design, dead sharp and contrasty, and with the interesting ability to close-focus down to 16 inches (it loses rangefinder coupling below, I think, 1 meter, with an obvious detent in the focusing). It's hard to beat as a general-purpose normal lens without paying Leitz prices; I usually describe it as "neutral", a lens that does its job without drama and stays out of the way. A little bit of oil is visible on the aperture blades (pictured below); it's been there as long as I've owned the lens and doesn't seem to have migrated or caused any other issues.
-NT
I'd prefer to sell the kit together; US$750 for the whole set, shipped in the US.
Bessa-R: Definitely a user-condition body, with significant wear showing at the corners (the worst corner is shown in the pictures), but as far as I can tell it's functionally perfect. The rangefinder has a very slight misalignment in the vertical direction only (pictured below; the circled area shows the offset between the two images of a single knob), which has never bothered me in use so I've never done anything about it.
75mm f/2.5 Color-Heliar: This is a seriously nice portrait lens, particularly good at taming contrasty light in my experience. Here we have the silver version, with its original hood and caps, and pretty much pristine with the exception of some slight wear on the mounting end. It's been discontinued in favor of the M-mount version and you don't see too many of them on the used market; there's a reason for that: they're good.
50mm f/2 Nikkor-H (a.k.a. "Nikkor-HC", but this is after they stopped using the "C" since all their lenses were coated): This lens is Nikon's version of the 6-element Sonnar design, dead sharp and contrasty, and with the interesting ability to close-focus down to 16 inches (it loses rangefinder coupling below, I think, 1 meter, with an obvious detent in the focusing). It's hard to beat as a general-purpose normal lens without paying Leitz prices; I usually describe it as "neutral", a lens that does its job without drama and stays out of the way. A little bit of oil is visible on the aperture blades (pictured below); it's been there as long as I've owned the lens and doesn't seem to have migrated or caused any other issues.
-NT
