A gallery that shows my collection of 35mm cameras from the Japanese camera manufacturer Kowa. The cameras were never as popular as Canon/Nikon/Pentax , they were cheaper to buy but when they went wrong they were difficult to repair. The Seikosha leaf shutter design together with a separate mirror and film blind (for the SLR's) meant that the sequence of linkages caused a noisy double clatter. Whilst you could sync with flash at any speed up to 1/500th sec the complexity of the mechanism over time resulted in reliability problems. Kowa kept with the design but, ultimately, it could never compete with the established Japanese manufacturers that were using focal plane shutters and the mostly industry standard M42 screw thread lenses of the time. The individual design of the Kowa leaf shutter mount meant owners had little choice over lenses other than a few Prominars (28mm to 200mm) and some screw in wide angle and telephoto adapters. Kowa ceased its camera production in 1978 after 24 years.
There are no commercially available adapters to use the lenses of the SER, SETR and SET2 cameras so I have made my own from a donor SETR2 camera and various couplers adapted to enable infinity focus on mirrorless cameras.