Beauty Lightomatic II (1960)

Beauty Lightomatic II (1960)

#441

This photo is from the copy I own

History and technical features 

The Beauty Lightomatic is a series of 35mm rangefinder cameras made by Beauty Camera from 1959 to 1963. The early Lightomatics helped pioneer integral coupled metering, following the Mamiya Elca, Minolta Autowide and Konica S, made possible by their use of the Copal SV series of shutters.

List of versions:

Beauty Lightomatic or Beauty LM
Beauty Lightomatic II
Beauty Lightomatic III, Lightmatic III and Beauty Lite III
Beauty Lightmatic SP
It is sometimes said that the "Lightomatic LM" is a name variant of the Lightomatic II, but this is perhaps a mistake. A Beauty LM2 is also reported.

Source: camerapedia


Specifications

The 1960 Lightomatic II featured:

Cosmetic restyle and improvement of Lightomatic / LM chassis.
Addition of brightline finder window at front panel.
Coupled selenium meter with squared match-needle window on top, and magnified match-needle window seen in finder.
Copal-SV shutter with speeds B, 1sec to 1/500s.
Biokor-S 45 mm / f1.9 lens with 5 aperture blades. Rotation for focusing is opposite from earlier lenses.
And again the advance lever must be pulled out to unlock shutter release.

Source: camerapedia


The Beauty Lightomatics are a series of 35mm rangefinder cameras made by the Beauty Camera Company between 1959 and 1963.

Each model shares some common features.

Viewfinder: Integrated coincidence rangefinder/viewfinder with self-correcting bright line.
Focus: Coupled rangefinder with manual ring on lens barrel.
Meter: Selenium meter electro-mechanically coupled to lens barrel aperture, shutter speed settings, and film speed index.
Exposure: Centre-the-needle system with pointer window on the top plate of the camera.
Lens: 45mm f1.9 (6 elements in unknown number of groups) stopping down to f16.
Close Focus: 0.8m / 2'7".
Shutter:. Five blade Copal-SV shutter with speeds: B, 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 60, 125, 250 & 500 sec,. plus B. Shutter speeds and aperture settings can be interlocked. The shutter release locks when the advance lever is flush with the camera body.
Cable Release: Standard socket in shutter release button.
Filter Size: 55mm screw in.
Flash: Cold shoe and PC terminal. M and X sync.
Film Advance Single stroke lever.
Frame Counter: Counts up. Resets automatically when camera back is opened.
Rewind: Collapsible crank, and rewind selector switch.

The Beauty Lightomatic II was introduced in 1960.
The lens is a Biokor-S.
The meter needle pointer window was re-designed so that it's shape changed from circular to rectangular, and the exposure adjustment graphic was abandoned along with the film type reminder. This was replaced by a table showing film speed setting parameters (e.g. a setting of 100 ASA accommodated films between 75 - 120 ASA.
The viewfinder was changed to Bright-Frame (i.e. projected lines) which required an illumination window, and this along with the rangefinder and viewfinder windows where unified by a singe glass covering.

Source: camera-wiki.org


Model

Serial number R 3980


Reference sites

camerapedia

camera-wiki.org

Manual

English manual


Film


Pictures taken with this camera


Videos