These are certainly my favorite 2 1/4 cameras ever. They're so beautifully made and well thought out, and such a delight to work with.

I owned a number of lesser twin-lens reflex cameras before I finally got a genuine Rollei, including a Yashia-Mat, a Kodak Reflex and a quite nice Zeiss Ikoflex. None of these came close to the real thing though.

I have two of them, one is a mongrel E3, which I did a lens transplant on. (E 3s generally came with Schneider Xenar 75 f 3.5 lenses, but I had a junker 3.5F with a fabulous Zeiss Planar lens, so I did a transplant. This camera is quite beat-up and worn looking.

I also installed a Rolleikin, the adaptor that permits it to be used with 35 mm film. That's a gadget that seems kinda frivolous, but it gives the camera unique capabilities!

The Rolleikin setup is excellent for portraiture...it is the only way to get a waist level finder with a vertical ("portrait") orientation of the image. In addition, the Rollei's leaf shutter permits it to be used wit fill flash in all light conditions, since it syncs flash at all spees.

When I worked at Newtonville Camera, I came upon a great deal on a pretty cherry Rollei 3.5F, which needed a new shutter spring, so now I've got two. The 3.5F has a surprisingly decent selenium exposure meter coupled to the controls.

Another nifty Rolleiflex accessory is the "Rolleimeter" rangefinder attachment for the sports finder. This gives nice bright eye-level focussing.