C41
Kodak Portra 400
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
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The Royer Savoyflex is a 35mm single-lens reflex camera produced by the French manufacturer Royer, based in Toulouse, from approximately 1957. It is an unusual camera in the broader SLR landscape because it combines a true SLR viewing system - light passes through the taking lens to a pentaprism viewfinder - with a fixed, non-interchangeable lens and a leaf shutter rather than the focal-plane shutter that would become standard on SLR designs. This configuration places it in a category alongside cameras like the Contaflex and the Voigtlander Bessamatic: cameras that offered the SLR advantage of through-the-lens composition while retaining the leaf shutter's flash synchronisation at all speeds.
Reference
Recommended film stocks for the 35mm format your camera takes.
C41
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
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Kodak Tri-X 400 is a classic black-and-white film known for strong tonality, visible grain, and documentary character.
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Kodak Gold 200 is a daylight-balanced C-41 color negative film with warm color, moderate grain, and a classic consumer-film look.
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Before you buy used
About this camera
A French 35mm SLR from 1957 with a fixed Som Berthiot lens and a leaf shutter, made by a Toulouse manufacturer better known for folding cameras.
| Field | Value |
|---|
| Format | 35mm |
| Lens | Som Berthiot ~45-50mm, max aperture ~ f/2.8 or f/3.5 |
| Shutter | Leaf, ~1s - 1/300s + B |
| Flash sync | X sync at all shutter speeds (leaf shutter) |
| Meter | None |
| Focus | Manual |
| Viewfinder | SLR pentaprism |
| Battery | None required |
Royer was established in Toulouse in the postwar period, producing folding cameras that competed in the lower-to-mid tier of the French market. The company's most common products were folding 35mm cameras carrying Berthiot or Angénieux lenses. The Savoyflex represented a departure into SLR territory, introduced around 1957 as Japanese and German SLR cameras were beginning to define the serious amateur camera market.
The leaf-shutter SLR configuration was a European approach to the SLR format that was distinct from the Japanese focal-plane designs then emerging from Canon, Nikon, and Miranda. Several European manufacturers - Zeiss Ikon with the Contaflex, Voigtlander with the Bessamatic, Kodak with the Retina Reflex - pursued the same hybrid design in this period. Royer's entry into this category was smaller in scale and shorter-lived than those competitors.
The exact production end date for the Savoyflex is not well documented in available sources.
The Savoyflex is historically interesting as evidence of the breadth of the European SLR experiment in the late 1950s. The leaf-shutter SLR was a technically coherent alternative to the focal-plane SLR: it preserved flash synchronisation at all shutter speeds, which was a meaningful practical advantage in studio and event photography before electronic flash became inexpensive. The fact that a relatively modest manufacturer like Royer produced an SLR at all reflects the degree to which SLR design had become aspirational for camera makers of this era.
The Som Berthiot lens fitted to the Savoyflex shares the optical character of Berthiot glass found on other French cameras: moderate resolution, distinctive rendering at wider apertures, and a quality that differs from the sharper, higher-contrast Zeiss or Nikkor alternatives. This makes the camera of interest to photographers who appreciate the aesthetic of French postwar optics.
BW
Ilford HP5 Plus is a flexible ISO 400 black-and-white film with classic grain and strong push-processing tolerance.
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Kodak Ektar 100 is a fine-grain C-41 color negative film with saturated color and high sharpness.
View profile →Royer Savoyflex
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