The Comet S - An alloy 127 camera made in Milano Italy by Bencini C.M.F
- Kamera Ostalgie
- May 21
- 5 min read
I'm not sure why I like these Bencini cameras, they are not high spec, high quality, neither are they rare or valuable. The shutter has one speed plus B, the aperture is f 11, but that is it, just f 11 nothing else. So maybe that is why I like them, they are simple in the extreme, worth very little and are still very common. Oh and I forgot to mention, they are stylish and built to last for ever.
Typical Italian, it has to look flash, cool and stylish, this camera is definitely a case of style over substance! It looks fantastic, but the spec is abysmal.
On the flip side it is so solid, a lovely lump of cast alloy, a simple one speed shutter, strong and very little to go wrong. Putin could drop a bomb on it and it would still be working!
Bencini produced thousands of these alloy wonders in the 1950's and 1960's along with a few other similar alloy creations. Many of then ended up here in the fantastic country of Great Britain, courtesy of Boots the photographers Chemist. Most of them are still here, clogging up the eBay listings for under a tenner!
Seriously though, these alloy Italians are a very interesting bunch of cameras, their design turns conventional camera manufacturing tradition on its head, inside out and upside down at the same time, yet while still producing a good useable camera for the working man. If the V.W Beetle was classed as Hitler's peoples car in the late 1930's, then Bencini produced the peoples camera in Italy a decade later in the late 1940's. So, come on then, lets have a good look at one of their alloy wonders!
The original Comet was produced just after the war in 1948, with the decimation of Dresden and the surrounding manufacturing areas, the German camera industry was in tatters, this left a massive gap in the immediate post war camera market, a gap in which many small new Italian companies tried to fill, which for a short while thy did. However the Germans bounced back quickly from the aftermath of the war, filling the gap very quickly themselves.
Directly after the war in Italy, around thirty small independent companies started to produce cameras of varying design and quality, from simple box cameras to Leica copies that were probably better than Leica's themselves. But a decade after the war over half of these Italian manufacturers were no longer in camera production, and by the beginning of the 1960's only two remained, Ferrania, who were probably better known in Britain for film manufacture and the the producers of our feature camera, Bencini. However in this short period Italy produced some very interesting cameras.
The original Comet came out in 1948, the designer was student Roberto Bencini, son of company founder Antonio Bencini. The 1948 Comet design was updated a few times during the 1950's, giving us the Comet II, Comet IIS and finally the example here, the Comet S. Even the Comet S was modified, there are at least two distinctly different versions, one with the name at the front of the camera body, the other ( the example we have here ) with the name on the top plate.
This rather grubby example here of a Comet S shows the name on the front of the camera, the accessory shoe is of a different design, as is the film winding knob. there are examples with other slight differences too.
I'm guessing that these are just production differences, the Comet was in production a long time, there was a need to get production costs down, so changes are probably a result of this rather than specification up dates or improvements.
The above page from the instruction book shows that the spec and features are quite basic and minimal. We do have a flash contact on the lens barrel and a lever to set the shutter to bulb when required. Lets have a closer look.
The flash contact can be seen on the top left of the lens barrel.
Focusing is from three feet to infinity and is clearly marked.
Shutter speed adjustment is by this little lever mounted on the lens barrel. The choice is huge, 1/50th of a second or Bulb !
What more do you possibly need?
The Comet takes 16 exposures on a roll of 127 film. You wind on until the number one is seen in the left hand red window. For frame two, wind on until number one can bee seen in the right hand window. Frame three is the number two in the left window, frame four is number 2 in the right, and so on and so forth until you end up with number eight in the right window, which means you are at the end of the roll with sixteen frames exposed! Simple!
As the above image shows, holding the Comet S in the normal horizontal position gives you a vertical portrait image. The unusual shutter can also be seen.
These Bencini cameras are very unusual in their design features, both the shutter and the viewfinder shown here are not common camera design.
The Comets film chamber. This is where your expensive roll of 127 film will fit!
In this crazy world at the moment, a roll of film will cost you more than the camera!
The camera instruction book produced by the importers, Boots, is actually not bad for a cheaper camera. It is well illustrated and well written.
The instruction book also lists the accessories available for the Comet S. I was lucky, when I bought this camera years ago, it came with a boxed highly polished screw in lens hood. The lens hood is really well made and better finished than most. Looking at the hood you would never expect it to be for a cheaper snapshot camera.
That is a quality lens hood, and it really matches the look of the camera, looking good when fitted on.
I really don't know what to think about Bencini cameras. They are a real contradiction. In one way they are just a cheap basic camera, yet in other ways they are really well made, well finished and of a very original design.
Just the casting itself is a work of art. the time it must have taken to fettle and polish the casting makes you wonder how they produced them at the price.
Whatever way you look at these cameras, they have style in abundance. From every angle they are different. In looks, in design, in finish, in style, everything about them is unconventional in the extreme.
I suppose I'm going to have to put a film
through it at some point, see if it actually performs as good as it looks. This guy already has done that, take a look.
But it not just the Bencini Comet that looks good, all of their cameras do, take a look at his one below.
This is the Comet s 's big brother, the Koroll 24 S. Another unusual work of art! I have written about this camera before on my blog.
If you are interested have a look here.
So, that is it, our quick look at the Bencini Comet -S.
I supose it is a bit of a Marmite camera, you either love em or hate em! Personally I think the Bencini's were great.
If you are looking to start a collection of vintage cameras and you are not flushed with cash, or you were born in Yorkshire or Scotland, then collecting and using Bencini cameras would really make good sense. Broaden it out a bit and collecting 1950's Italian cameras also makes good sense.
Take a look at the Ferrania Tanit or Ibis for example, other great little Italian cameras of odd design, just right for collecting, but Bencini has to be the smart option, go on, look on eBay and get a few! Currently there are 120 of them for sale, many under a tenner, you should be able to pick a nice one out!
Phil
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