P3D Re: my biased perspective on cameras

["John Goodman" <jgood@xxxxxxxx>]

John Toeppen wrote

> The VM Personal was very cute in concept but marginal in execution.  The
> market for this product (the kid with $90 to spend that wanted to save
> pennies) was very small.  The Kid's parents wanted a Realist, Revere, or
> Kodak. The VM was not very well engineered.

My gut feeling is that the Personal was built like a tank, 
and very well designed by Gordon Smith (who also 
designed the TDC-Stereo-Vivid). It's a pleasure to use and 
I only wish the angle of view were a bit wider. I am often 
amazed at the performance of this "toy" format, its ability, 
when using a nice viewer, to put people in a view and give 
them the pleasure of exploring things in three dimensions. 
Seven at one blow, no less.

The Personal has several features that enchance its ease 
of use and must have appealed to Sawyer's 25,000 
customers who bought one (less than a fifth, granted, of 
the number who bought Realists). It's great to have a spirit 
level in the finder, and the explosure calculator is friendly 
and helpful. BTW, it shows about 2/3 of a stop more 
exposure than sunny 16, yielding better results in many 
cases for me. It is also uncommon, but enlightened, to 
have the shutter release on a vertical surface, where it is 
least likely to cause image degrading camera movement 
when used.

The continuously variable aperture and shutter is another 
nice feature, quite in contrast to a Revere or Wollensak, 
where the detents for both are at full stop intervals. There 
is no mechanical feel or sounds when shutter speeds are 
changed (except, perhaps, when moving into the B area). 
I'd be surprised if changing the shutter speed after 
advancing a frame were something to be avoided with this 
camera.

The Personal's Achilles heel most often mentioned seems 
to be shutter bounce, and it is laborious to fix. From what I 
understand, a non-metalic gasket deep inside the camera 
can lose its resillience after 40-odd years. Another problem 
I have seen is deterioration in the coatings of the clear 
glass discs covering the shutters, but this can be remedied 
without major surgery.

The fact that Personals and components for it are eagerly 
snapped up on eBay, often at inflationary prices, would 
seem to show that this system "takes a licking, and keeps 
on clicking." Unless the majority are just collectors who 
don't use their equipment.       :-)

John Goodman


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