BLAST FROM THE PAST
John Wade looks at one of America’s most popular 35mm cameras
LAUNCHED 1939
PRICE AT LAUNCH approximately £10
GUIDE PRICE NOW £20-30
Made of Bakelite with chrome trim and squared-off corners, the Argus C3 looks like an Art Deco brick. More than two million were produced. Top right of the front is a dial to set shutter speeds of 1/10–1/300sec. Top left, another dial protrudes above the height of the body to be rotated by a finger whilst looking through the rangefinder window to the side of the viewfinder. As well as coupling to the rangefinder the dial is connected via a gear wheel to the focusing ring of the 50mm f/3.5 Cintar lens. Bearing in mind, however, that the further apart rangefinder windows are placed, the more accurate the mechanism, the fact that the C3’s windows are only about 5mm apart doesn’t bode well for accurate focusing.
Apertures are set on a ring around the lens. Unfortunately, fitting a filter or lens hood covers this aperture ring, making it impossible to adjust. To get round that, a small ‘Y’-shaped accessory was produced with two small holes in the arms of the ‘Y’ that drops over two equally small dimples on the aperture ring. With a filter or lens hood in place, the protruding tail of the ‘Y’ is used to change apertures – even though it is still almost impossible to see the settings beneath the filter or hood.
Idiosyncrasies
