AGFA SUPER SILETTE

THE CAMERA:

I picked this up at a flea market from a fellow who had this and the identical twin cousin, the Ansco Super-Memar. This is from 1956 and has the six element Solagon 50mm 1:2 lens and Synchro-Compur shutter. It's a beauty of a camera with some nice features like coupled aperture and shutter rings and a slow scale for shooting in low light on B.

First, you press a tab on the aperture ring and set the shutter ring to the EV value you're shooting. Release the tab and the aperture ring is locked to the shutter ring allowing you to set what ever shutter speed you like (or aperture) and it keeps the proper setting.

Also there is a scale on the lens for calculating low light shooting from EV 1 to 6. If you set the EV for example to 3 and the shutter to B, you take a reading from the scale and you can see that you can properly expose using 4 seconds at f/5.6, 8 sec at f/8, 15 sec at f/11 or 30 seconds at f/16 (following that 'pattern', you could use 2 seconds at f/4 and 1 second at f/2.8).

FIXES:

Aside from some very minor cosmetics, it's in great shape, shutter fires good on all speeds etc. The rangefinder focus spot was messed up though, It was sticking and not moving throughout the focus range and the infinity is off. I wasn't sure how to go about it as there is no documentation I could find.

I removed the top plate and saw that the rangefinder housing is simply held down with 3 screws so I removed the housing and on the bottom the plate that slides back and forth as you move the lens focus was gummed up. A very simple but effective rangefinder set-up made it easy to fix (but was also most likely the cause of the problem) The infinity adjust was also simple, done by turning a screw under the rangefinder housing.

Here is a photo from this camera

MANUAL:

Agfa Super Silette owners manual

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