Argus A2B

I’ve owned two Argus A2Bs, bought five years apart. The first one, I liked okay — it wasn’t a stellar performer, and it was fiddly to use, but it didn’t put me off. The second one, substantially the same camera, I didn’t like using at all. The A2B belongs to the Argus A series, one of the first cameras built to take advantage of the 35mm cartridge Kodak introduced in 1934. Kodak’s own Retina got there first, but at a price most people couldn’t touch. Argus’s original A, introduced in 1936 for $12.50 (more than $300 today), brought 35mm photography within reach of far more people. The A2B followed in 1939, adding an extinction meter and exposure calculator to help with exposure guesswork. Read the full history here. I was curious enough about both the camera and the extinction meter concept that I went looking for one. First impressions The A2B is small, dense, and built almost entirely of Bakelite, with a run of Art-Deco fluting across the metal back that’s common to every A-series…