The Purma Special.

I'm not catching up with my postings very quickly, that will have to wait till next week, but at least I'm not losing ground.

The Purma Special was a bakelite camera manufactured from 1937 until 1951 (except for during the war years). As I write this, a handful are up for auction on E-bay with two sitting at £49.95 each with 20 hours left to run; I haven't been able to find the original price but the up-market Purma Plus sold for the magnificent sum of £12 12s.

I find it surprising that this crude design is contemporary with the Voigtlander Brilliant that I blipped a wee while ago. Crude it might be, but having seen pictures both from this particular camera, and on the internet, it did produce surprisingly good results.

The lens is a pop-out affair with the screw-on lens cap holding it in while not in use, the major disadvantage of this is that it is very difficult to take the Special out of its leather case to replace the film; the leather has suffered some-what as a consequence.

Various internet sites describe the Purma range as having a curved film plane, not quite true as close inspection reveals that, although the back of the camera is curved, the film runner is actually flat over most of the picture area with a little curve at each end. The same sites also praise the clarity of the view finder, they’re wrong! It’s tiny and dim, rather like looking the wrong way through a powerful but dirty telescope.

The aperture is fixed at f6.3 while the focus is fixed at the 20 feet hyper-focal distance, there was a selection of clip-on close-up lenses available to overcome the focus restriction.
The shutter speed is controlled by a brass weight/cam that adjusts the width of the focal plane shutter while gravity controls its speed, both settings are dependant on which way up the camera is held, so there were fast, medium and slow settings. As far as composing the picture was concerned, the 31mm square format (16 shots on 127 film) meant camera attitude wasn't important so making this method of shutter speed selection practical. However, you would be in difficulty if you wanted to point the camera up or down.