Lone Riders Gno III

I have written about over 300 cameras on this website, and all of them were mentioned online. Some had a lot of data; some were mentioned on the fly, but there were some records. The camera on my bench now seems to be an exception. Not a word online. There are 181 Zettabytes of online data, and I have no way to comprehend what a Zettabyte is, but nary a mention of the Gno III camera.

The only mention in print is in McKeown’s, where it is described as a “well-made and very uncommon”, which I would add is a very uncommon comment by the author. A similarly named camera is the Gnoflex TLR, attributed to either Topcon or Musashi, presumably made for a distributor in Japan.

The camera is named Gno III, with no trace of any earlier version or make, so I have catalogued it under the ‘lone rider’ family.  When I compiled my database on camdex.ca, I looked for a group name for manufacturers whose names were unknown. ‘Orphan cameras’ was already taken by Butkus, and ‘bastard cameras’ is undignified. So ‘Lone Riders’ category came to be. I assume the camera was made in Post-War Japan, though there is no supporting evidence.

The camera on my bench is well preserved, does not look fresh, but has no user damage other than some minor scratches on the body paint. Skin is all in place, which is much more than I could say of the era cameras. Mechanically, it hums and buzzes, although slow speeds take some encouragement, as does the self-timer. The markings on the lens assembly have not survived the test of time and are now blurry.

• The body is all metal, no plastic present, in a satin finish. The designers had put some thought into it, as it is well-balanced, pleasing to the user’s hand and eye. The control cranks feature a finger-friendly handle, so there is no need to sacrifice a fingernail to change a position.
• Other than one lever, the camera subscribes to the ‘no manual needed’ class. See further.
• Top has a large winding knob, with an embedded, manual reset frame counter. The winder does not cock the shutter but stops after each frame. Next is the rewind release crank, as said, finger-friendly.
• The viewer is large and bright, a relief after the dozen or so impractical viewers I’ve gone through in the past several weeks, all European.
• The front, close to the top, is another crank handle, marked with an arrow towards ‘D’. I have fiddled with it, and it seems to allow for a double exposure, which was popular at the time.
• The removable back is released via a bottom-mounted large disk, marked ‘O ’ and ‘C’. Inside, there are no surprises here: two film bays, a machined film track and two sprockets to keep the roll well behaved.
• At the bottom, there are two mounting bushings and a pin under the lens assembly to hold the camera from tilting forward.
• The lens assembly is uncommon.
  • The aperture settings show through an elongated slot on the top of the lens barrel, which is about the only setting that is readable on this camera. Changing it is done by a lever at the bottom of the lens barrel.
  • A lever in front of it cocks the shutter. Next is a serrated dial that sets the shutter speed. A red dot on this dial hovers over the shutter speed markings; none is readable, all are fuzzy. Perhaps bad printing or poor aging.
  • A remote trigger and sync ports are at sides of this dial.
  • The self-timer lever is at four o’clock, on the same dial. To my surprise, it still works on this camera.
  • The focusing dial is at the very front, marked in meters, with a depth-of-field scale around it.

The above brings an ever-recurring question. Without clear information, I assume this camera was made in Japan in the post-war years. If so, the target market was the GI contingent stationed there. It would make more sense to mark the distance in feet, as both then and now, the Americans have no clue about the metric system. Further, if it was meant for the local market, why are all markings in Latin letters, rather than Kanji? And last, the mounting bush in all cameras is 1/4“ BSW, which was long abandoned by the Brits. No camera is made today in the NC hemisphere; all are metric or JIS, yet threads are always BSW.  And, yes, I know about 1/4“ NC similarity.

For the collector, it depends on one’s interest. It will be a significant addition to the Japanese shelf, but on the other hand, it would be meaningless to the European model collector. The Gno III rarely shows up for sale, so you may grab one if it is offered.