Bencini Comet III
The Bencini Comet III is styled vertically rather than horizontally and looks like a cine camera
Collectors come in a range of flavours. There are the completists, who aren’t happy until they have every variation of a particular model; there are those who aim to get an example of a broad range of camera types; and there are those, like me, who will grab anything with a lens and a shutter. However, there is one area where I have completist tendencies, and that’s when it comes to Italian Bencini cameras.
I’ve written before about my fondness for these mass-market models. On the whole, they were cheap, cheerful and stylish little cameras, which sold in large numbers in the 1950s and ’60s. As well as appearing under the Bencini name, they were also offered as own-brand models in the UK, particularly by Boots.
The Comet and Koroll models were the backbone of the range, the Comet using the now obsolete 127 film format and the Koroll the still widely available 120 rolls. Both ranges had models taking 12 or 16 shots per roll, with the Koroll 24 variants squeezing in 24 exposures by means of masking down the film plane to produce smaller negatives. Most of the ranges are widely available and cheap, but I had to spend around £30 on the Comet III (left), which is quite different from the rest, and indeed from most other rollfilm cameras, in that it is styled vertically rather than horizontally, and can easily be mistaken for a cine camera.
The Comet III is a fairly basic camera. It has shutter speeds of 1/50sec and ‘B’, and the lens has only one aperture. The Comet III has a focusing lens, not to be confused with the Comet 3, which is identical in specification except that it is fixed focus. There is a tripod bush and a threaded cable-release socket, together with a cold shoe and a PC connection for your flashgun. It came with a well-made leather case.
In 2012, 100 years after its introduction, 127 film was on the verge of extinction. I was down to my last roll of MacoColor, the only available colour negative film, so I thought I’d better find some colourful subjects, as from now on it’s monochrome only for these cameras. Bright-red gas cylinders seemed to fit the bill. They were quite close to the camera, making the ability to focus essential if they were not to be all blurred.