This is a direct copy of a post I made last year regarding Seiko and their shutters.
I'll second the Fujinon 150 lens in the Seiko shutter. I would rather put my money on a Seiko shutter than others, Seiko is probably right now, the pre-eminent watch maker in the world.
At the height of mechanical watch manufacturing, Seiko were basically unmatched, especially when it came to mechanical gear trains and such. This was in the seventies.
Seiko started manufacturing camera shutters in 1930.
In the leadup to the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games and only two years out (1962) Seiko submitted mechanical stop watches to the Swiss, these stopwatches had an innovative type of heart shaped cam that Seiko had invented. The officials who were testing the stopwatches had difficulty understanding the accuracy of these watches, so enquired as to how Seiko had achieved this.
Another interesting titbit of information about Seiko and their driven desire to manufacture the worlds best timepieces, and the 1964 Olympic games, is that Seiko had to design and manufacture electronic printers for the readouts.
The electronic printer division, sometime after the Olympic games, was hived off into another part of Seiko. The name of that new company was derived from the original divisions name and in a traditional manner it was named son of. The wording then became Electronic Printer's SON, or EPSON.
I currently own two Fujinon 150 W lenses, both of which are in Seiko shutters. Wishing to know whether one shutter was better than the other, I had the shutter speeds tested last month, both shutters are remarkably similar in their speeds, both shutters also have the same slight deviations, which I take to be their inherent build characteristics, and I think, tells me that both are running, more or less, as they exited from the factory.
I spent an abnormal amount of time in the late sixties and all through the seventies at motor racing tracks, in the pits. What I learnt there about mechanical timers, was that there were two kinds of time; normal time and Seiko time.
By the way I have a Seiko wrist watch which is simple, mechanical, waterproof to 10 bar, small and extremely accurate. It has an accuracy of 0.2 seconds a day!
The Seiko Speedmaster SBBT001 chronograph wristwatch, is the world's only chronograph with 1/100 second accuracy.
Most of you probably do not know much about Seiko and their history of driven excellence. Yes, they have made some products that were not even reasonably good. Generally these were either marketing mistakes, or material failure, especially after WWII when quality materials were not that readily available.
Mick.
