Rolleiflex Rollei Advice Blog

July 27, 2011 lenses No comments

This is Leica/Minox’ most successful classic miniature camera, if only from the aesthetic point of view. Most of its other offerings, like the miniature Leica M3s, have an unsightly bulge at the rear of the camera body to incorporate the required battery. The Rollei design manages to incorporate the battery entirely within the vastly shrunken camera body.

External detailing is well done, although as with the Leica miniatures, most of the controls are nonfunctional. A cute (or annoying, depending on your point of view) feature is the requirement to crank the “film advance” lever between each shot.

Sadly, the camera’s photos fall just under the “edge of usable”. Although advertised as having a 2 megapixel sensor, its actual resolution is only 1.4 megapixels (1200 x 1200). The images are distinctly fuzzy, and the camera’s tiny backlit LCD is too dim and grainy to be usuable, even indoors where there’s not enough light for this flashless camera to operate in any case.

That said, the camera is still an attractive functional toy, and the image quality can be greatly improved by some minor fiddling with almost any image editor. I used iPhoto’s controls to sharpen the image and adjust the brightness and contrast, which made a huge difference in the image quality.

It’s a little disappointing: I’m sure Leica could have used a better quality sensor and lens to produce a miniature camera with much better image quality.

Help answer the question about Rolleiflex Rollei
is it worth it to purchase the rolleiflex MiniDigi?
i really, really Rolleiflex Rollei like this camera http://www.rollei.jp/e/pd/MiniDigiAF.html, but probably only because of the way it looks. is it worth the buy?