Pentagon Six TL with 80mm lens. Nice medium format camera.

The Pentacon 6 is a medium format system camera, a SLR that takes 6×6 pictures on 120 film. It has been called an “SLR on steroids”. Its predecessor was KW‘s Praktisix with which it shares the bayonet mount. The famed Carl Zeiss Jena plant made lenses for this Pentacon Six mount. The Soviet factory Arsenal made a closely related camera called Kiev 6 and later Kiev 60. A basic kit consists of a Carl Zeiss Biometar 1:2.8 80 mm lens, a simple matte screen and a waist-level finder. This is a system camera and lenses from a 30 mm fisheye to a 1000 mm mirror objective are available. Lenses are still made and sold by Arsenal in Kiev (Arsat brand) and the Czech company Hartblei.

Excellent Carl Zeiss Jena and Schneider lenses can be found at reasonable prices from the usual used-camera sources. A variety of viewing screens, from simple matte to grids or fresnel screens, are available. The waist-level finder can be replaced by non-metered or metered prism finders. The metered prisms were introduced in 1968; from this point onwards, the camera was called Pentacon six TL. Nothing had changed in the camera itself; the only thing new was the availability of a metered prism allowing TTL metering.

Camera :  Pentacon Six TL