Candid Camera Perfex Forty-Four

Candid Camera family list
Perfex Speed
Perfex Forty-Four
Perfex Fifty-Five

The first camera by Candid Camera Corporation of America was the Perfex Speed of 1938. Hastily designed by outsiders to the trade, it ended as an exercise in how not to design a practical camera. As a mitigating note, the timing of its introduction was a bit off, being the tail end of the Great Depression, and devices for leisure use still needed some time to digest. There are no production figures for the Perfex Speed, but it was not a stellar success.

On the heels of the Speed, the company’s mandarins deliberated long and hard, and decided to have a second shot with a camera that would look and feel like, well, a camera. It was not a revolutionary idea, but it worked. It seems that the same designers were behind the fresh design, but at least they had looked into what the others offered. The launch time was better, as the middle class’s pockets grew deeper and the Japanese camera invasion was still a decade in the future.

The fresh camera, introduced in 1938, was named Perfex Forty Four, the first in a line of numbered models of no apparent order. It was followed by the Fifty Five in 1940.

The Forty Four was a smaller, yet heavy camera, with a streamlined design. It retained the shutter and the lens mount of the Pefex Speed, but in a modern package. The bakelite body was dropped in favour of some metal alloy, and finishes were a world apart from the Speed. The new lens weight had dropped from 220 gr to 140 gr. The camera on my bench, 87 years old, is well finished: smooth coating, well-machined parts, no rust, good skin, and mechanical components that hum and buzz as they should. It offered an impressive shutter speed range, from B to 1250. Other than the shutter, the mount and name, it has nothing to do with the early model. The selling price well reflects that, launched at USD 38 as opposed to the USD 25 of the Speed of the previous year.

This is not to say that the camera is in the class it was intended to be. It was still crude, lagging behind the German competition. Nonetheless, it was on par with other mass-market US-made cameras of the time.

The camera suffered from a bad reputation, with erratic shutter behaviour and poor flash sync, which was one of the selling points. Perhaps that was the reason for this model’s short production life, just one year.

• As mentioned, the body is all metal, with flowing and rounded shoulders. No sharp edges as in the Speed. A well-preserved, although now shrunken and peeling in places, leatherette skin had replaced the bare bakelite, and the metal parts are flawlessly coated.
• The top hosts the winder knob, skirted by a frame counter. To reset the frame counter, lift the winder and set it to zero against the chevron pointer in front of it. The winder also cocks the shutter, and unlike the Speed, you don’t have to fight a counterspring. In the early models, turning the knob halfway flicked the knob back, which was rectified in later production runs.
• Next is the trigger, which is set within the shutter speed setting dial. The Dial has two marking sets, in red and black; both take hawk eyes to read the values. The black markings are the fast speeds, 25 and up, and the red are the slow speeds. Accordingly, set the black markings against the black dot at the front of the dial and the red against the red dot at the rear. To select which set would engage, use the lower lever at the front of the body, marked ‘F’ and ‘S’, for fast and slow.
• A hot accessory shoe, uncommon in the era, is at about the middle.
• The rewind knob is on the left side. To allow rewind, set the top lever at the front of the body to ‘R’, for rewind.
• The back opens via two swing levers at the bottom, marked open and closed. Again, engraving too small for mortals. Swing both levers in, and the back slides off.
• Inside are the two film hollows, the image mask over a Leica-style focal plane cloth curtain shutter, and a double cog to guide the film. Note that there is nothing to hold the cartridge(s) in place, so it tends to fall when the back opens.
• The take-on hollow is large enough to accommodate a cartridge, for cartridge-to-cartridge configuration, so it allows mid-roll change while sacrificing the in-between portion.
• The serial number is printed on the bottom.
• The back of the camera is busy. There are two viewer windows:
  • The left is a picture-in-picture, square rangefinder window, coupled with the lens.
  • The right is the image composing window, returning a minute view.
  • An elongated window is the extinction meter window, which was fashionable at the time. It is simple to use: aim at the subject, and you’ll see a line of letters: KDIALGEJBFVCPxxxx. To use, note which letter in the scale is least visible and transfer it to the exposure computer disk at the back of the camera. I do not know if the letters are meant to present a phrase; if not, the selection makes little sense. A similar gabble is found in the Lumiere Eljy, where the phrase is LUMIPOSE, but it could mean something in French.

• The front is where the action is.
  • The top is adorned with four windows: the viewer, rangefinder 2ea and the meter.
  • At the left are the two levers mentioned above; the top is the rewind release marked ‘R’ and ‘T’ for rewind and transport, and the bottom the slow speed selector, marked ‘S’ and ‘F’, for slow and fast.
  • The focusing dial is closest to the body, difficult to grip. It has a long travel, almost the whole circle.
  • The lens thread is 1.5” x 32TPI. It is threaded into the focusing dial, so the whole lens assembly turns with it. As such, the aperture dial gradients turn with it, so it takes fresh searching for it with any distance change.
  • The next ring, black on my camera, carries distance markings, but does not turn. I’m unsure if it is just stuck or supposed to be this way, as the first ring does the focusing. No reference to that in the user manual.
  • The front ring is the aperture setting.

As with the earlier Perfex Speed, this model was short-lived, and is recommended for the shelf.  It is a typical exemplar of the mid-century American struggle with camera making, about as far as it had got.

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