Zeiss Ikon Nettar

I owned a phenomenal camera. A little pocket folding 6×6 Zeiss Ikon Nettar 518/16. Genuinely, some of my favourite images were captured on that camera.

It’s such a lightweight small camera that fits if your pocket, which makes it perfect for travelling. The only hang up is that it doesn’t have any way of focussing without guessing the distance. That isn’t a huge issue, most of the time I can either focus on infinity, use zone focussing or use an external range finder.

Just before I moved back to Australia from the UK, I gave it away. And I’ve regretted that decision ever since. I gave it as part of the Emulsive Secret Santa. My only regret really is that the person I gave it to doesn’t look like they used it at all. Which is pure blasphemy considering how good that camera is.

I had long been looking for a replacement at a reasonable price but I just couldn’t justify the $300AUD I’ve been seeing them come up for.

Then a shop called Camera Traders in Canada put a post on Bluesky saying that had an excellent copy, so I took punt. They posted that they had the 517/16 for a reasonable price. I jumped at the chance. I did forget that the shutter speeds are 3 and only 3, but I can get used to that.

The slightly newer 518 that I previously owned had a better range but it’s not hugely different and I can live with it. Especially as I plan to use this for FP4 and Delta 400.

It took a while (2 weeks) to arrive from Canada, but this is genuinely in great condition for a 70year old camera and whilst I was impatient, it was well worth the wait.

I took her out for a spin with some HP5 (expired Aug 2012) in Malmsbury about 1.5hours north of Melbourne, Australia.

Whilst I appear to have misplaced the viaduct roll, I’ll update the post when I finally scan them in.

*EDIT Update*

I found the roll scanned and here are a couple of the images.

She’s a keeper!

I next took the Nettar out to the Man Ray and Max Dupain exhibition at Heidi, and their gardens have some pretty cool art works.

It also gave me an opportunity to test out my new (to me) Minolta Spotmeter F. I’m still working out the kinks because I think it’s a tad off, but who knows. The metal sculpture was in full sun and read f16 I think I shot this at f11 with a view of putting the sculpture in the highlights but it appears to have perfectly exposed it. So maybe it’s a stop out or something, I’ll have to test it.

I wanted to test out how well the FP4 and D23r would cope with a very contrasty scene. Under the roof slats here was something like f4 and the sunny tree was f16. I metered to the average with a view of getting a bright tree with dark shadowy slats. It seemed to have worked out which is always nice!

I’ll have to do a darkroom print and I’ll update this post once done.

As always this roll was developed in FP4, for 8 minutes and scanned with a V600 and converted with NLP.

Overall it’s a huge thumbs up for the Zeiss Ikon Nettar from me!