Justin—read carefully.

I have been needing to upgrade my camera. I have been using an Olympus D-600L for four years now but I need to do higher quality work than it is capable of. A new digital camera that would do mostly what I want would be at least $2,000, which is out of the question.

I recently purchased an Epson Perfection 2450 scanner that does a *super* job of scanning negatives, particularly the 6 x 9 cm negs from my old medium format Mamiya Universal. It occured to me that it would make more sense to dust off and repair the Mamiya and scan those big 120 roll film negatives.

The Mamiya Universal is a range finder system camera with interchangeable backs and lenses and accessories such as ground glass backs (I have one). It's a completely manual camera with no interlocks. They were built between the late 60s and 1991. Mine had an old lens with a sticky shutter and an early grip that I wanted to update. Through the miracle of Ebay, I picked up a body with a broken range finder, and no back, but with a good lens and a later grip with the flash shoe on the grip for not much more that rebuilding the old lens.

Mine is on the left and the "new" one is on the right. After transferring the lens and grip, removing the grip cable release (it's easier to flick the shutter release on the lens with my thumb), and adding my Vivitar 283 to the top of the grip, I have a fully functional medium format camera. Now to order some Fuji NPH 400.

But wait! There's more! Just before the auction ended I discovered that the body on the "new" camera wasn't a Universal but a Super 23, which used the same lenses and backs, but was a little different. I wanted to use some of the body bits on my Universal and it looked like I wouldn't be able to use as much as I wanted. It was just the day before it arrived that I realized the big difference in the Super 23 was that it had a bellows back...

Now, most of you brought up on sissy 35mm cameras probably don't know about the perspective control you get in a view camera. You can make converging verticals parallel. You can enlarge your depth of field. It's great for close-ups. I had decided to forgo the larger 4 x 5 format, with its bellows, and go with medium format and I still got bellows. This is way to cool. You can see the movements of the back it has full movement up to the full extension. I'm going to keep this body and flat top it...

The range finder is broken and I will be using the ground glass so I will be removing the rangefinder. It will be great a wide angle camera when I get the wide angles lens since they don't use the range finder. They have their own finders. I will also be taking the old lens apart and using the mounting base for a pin hole. Let the fun begin.

Where does the 38 megapixels come from? I compared the size of the images from my 1.4 megapixel Olympus to the scans from the Mamiya negatives. They are that much bigger. How much bigger?