Rollei SL66 SE
Rollei may have come to the medium format SLR party a bit late, but when they made their entrance with the original SL66, they weren't playing around. While the original SL66 is a camera worthy of much acclaim in its own right, the successive versions of the SL66 line simply got better and better. By the time the SL66 SE was introduced in 1986, Rollei had crammed just about every possible improvement into the SL66 chassis that a photographer could want.
The simplest way to think about the SL66 SE is to consider it as an upgraded SL66 E that has added a spot meter function. Of course, this comparison works best assuming you are already familiar with the SL66 E (or even the original SL66, for that matter). Just in case you are unfamiliar with the previous SL66 models, let's just start from the bottom and work our way up.
At its most basic, the SL66 SE is a medium format SLR that features the same level of modularity as the Hasselblad 500 series. You can change lenses, film backs (mid roll, no less) and even the prisms. Where the SL66 SE rises above many of its medium format SLR brethren is that it has a light meter in the body of the camera, whereas most other similar style of cameras require the use of a metered prism. This means the SL66 SE is one of those rare, medium format cameras that can give you full metering even with a waist level hood on the camera! All this, plus a precision spot meter and TTL flash meter as well (the latter requiring specific flash units be used).
Outside of the camera's nifty electronics, the SL66 SE uses an extended focusing rail that allows up to 1.5x magnification. Talk about macro! To continue talking about macro, not only can you draw the lens out an incredible distance, but you can also reverse it, and mount it backwards, allowing for even greater macro magnification. This reversibility is one of the neater innovations of the SL66 line. That aforementioned focusing rack can also be tilted up or down by up to 8 degrees, which allows even greater depth of field for landscape images or for selective focusing.
Rollei redesigned their film magazines with the SL66 E and SE, moving away from the earlier design that detected the end of the film and engaged the frame counter automatically, over to a more traditional style that required the aligning of the film's start mark with an index mark in the back of the camera itself. This made loading a bit more familiar to most photographers, if not a bit less automatic, and it also means that film magazines from the earlier SL66 camera could not be used on the E or SE versions.
You can do a lot with an SL66 SE, and, while we understand how many might prefer the slimmed down contours of the Hasselblad 500C/M, we can also easily envision a photographer who prefers the sophistication of the SL66 SE.
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