Miranda MS-3

Miranda MS-3

I have to confess that when I first picked up this camera at a car boot sale I was somewhat disappointed with the build quality. It was marked up at £32 but I managed to haggle it down to £20 so thought what the hell and purchased it. This is a Dixon's own camera, not to be confused with the SLR's produced by the Miranda Camera Company from Japan. The Japanese Company ceased trading in the late 1970's and in the early 1980's the British electrical and photographic retailer Dixon's acquired the rights to the Miranda brand and used it on a range of photographic equipment. The quality of the camera isn't up to the Japanese models, it's mainly rubber and plastic and the focus ring is a bit stiff and slow on the Cosina kit lens. But spend a bit of time with it and it starts to grow on you. Easy to hold, quite tactile in fact and the more I used it the more it grew on me. The camera is most likely going to be used in semi automatic mode, meaning the user sets the aperture value and the camera selects the shutter speed, although a manual mode can be selected if desired. LED's seen through the viewfinder help with obtaining the correct exposure and the max shutter speed is 1/1000. There is also a bulb mode. The shutter mechanism works well and makes a positive sound when in operation. I was shooting with cheap Agfa Vista 200 ISO film which isn't the best but does the job. When I received the developed film back from the lab I was quite shocked at just how good the images were. The lens, while a relatively cheap and plasticky F1.8 50mm was obviously pretty darn sharp, the best of the cameras so far in fact. The camera tended to over expose bright scenes slightly so I would need to adjust for this in future, dialing in -0.3 E.V. to compensate would probably do the trick, nothing too drastic.

Overall I was very impressed with the results that this camera produced and it's certainly one I'll use again in the future.    

ISO dial and film rewind dial 

Film advance lever and shutter release button

The plasticky and rather cheeky Miranda MS-3

Nature's Harvest

Winter's Sun

Colourful leaves

A walk in the woods

Leaves burning bright