The US Navy Used the First Consumer Camera with a TTL Meter in the 1960’s
After spending the last few weeks actively shooting and researching the Pentax Spotmatic for a video project, I couldn’t help but start to wonder what the competition it faced when it first launched in 1964 was like.
One of the major selling features of the Pentax Spotmatic was the fact that it featured a TTL meter, a technical innovation that hadn’t yet caught on in the SLR world.
It wasn’t however the first camera on the market to feature a through-the-lens meter, nor was it the most technically advanced example of a TTL camera. Those titles belong to the Topcon RE Super, manufactured by Tokyo Kogaku, which was first released one year earlier in 1963.
The RE Super was an incredibly well made camera, aimed squarely at the professional market. In fact, it was born out of a race to build the official combat camera for the US armed forces that many different Japanese camera makers competed in. The RE Super ended up winning, and from ’63 to ’71 the Beseler Topcon Super D (the name given to the RE Super by the Charles Beseler Company, the official US importers for Topcon) became the official combat camera of the American Navy.
This camera was also quite technically advanced. Sure the 1/1000 sec. max speed cloth HFP shutter wasn’t anything to write home about, the camera did impress in other areas. For example, it was designed around the Exakta bayonet mount, and was able to offer open-aperture metering using the built in light-meter; a feature no other camera, not even the Spotmatic, could boast as early as 1963.
The light-meter was not only noteworthy because of its existence (there had been other implementations of on-camera light meter, but never TTL before), it also operated independently of the interchangeable prism. The meter was mounted behind the mirror glass. This would eventually become the standard configuration for TTL meters, but it would take more than a decade for other manufactures to replicated the design.
The Topcon RE Super was a fantastic, incredibly well made and technically advanced SLR made by a company that today gets very little recognition; having practically fallen out of memory, overshadowed by the giants such as Canon, Leica & Nikon. It’s too bad Topcon didn’t make it as a company, imagine what they might have come up with considering how far ahead of the pack they were in 1963.
This post originally appeared in The Chaotic Lensman newsletter.
Never miss a story – Subscribe now to The Chaotic Lensman and have old-fashioned, bite-sized analogue photography content delivered right to you inbox.
Image credit: E Magnuson, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
