The Rolleiflex 6006 is genuinely a great camera. Good lenses (the Carl Zeiss glass shared with the rest of the 6000 series), satisfying mechanical noise, fast motor winder, lovely 6x6 negatives. It works beautifully when it works.
I am selling mine anyway. This is the review of why.
There are three reasons, and they unfold in roughly the order this article does. The first is a six-month saga involving a broken first copy and a retired camera tech in Toronto. The second is that I already own the Rolleiflex SLX, which does almost exactly the same job. The third is a slightly uncomfortable observation about the long-term survival rate of 1980s electronics.
The saga of the first 6006
In February I bought a Rolleiflex 6006 at a camera fair in Toronto. It looked fine. Sounded fine. Shutter fired, film pulled through, all the usual reassuring signs. I got a roll through it and as the last frame fired it made a horrible grinding noise and failed to pull the rest of the film through. Had to take the camera into a dark bag to retrieve the roll. But the pictures were fine and the spacing was fine, so I assumed the problem was the film back.
I bought a new film back. Tested with more rolls. Each one seemed to work, then gradually slowed down, then started grinding, then eventually blew the fuse in the battery. Six months of this, on and off, before I had to accept that whatever was wrong was beyond my ability to diagnose, and that means electronics. Electronics are my weak link. I do not know enough about even primitive 80s electronics to fix them.
The saviour of the situation was Clay in Toronto, a retired camera tech and a genuinely lovely man. Clay made me a deal. He would take the broken 6006 off my hands, sell me a known-working 6006 for less than half price, then attempt to fix the broken one and sell it on himself. Everyone wins, hopefully.
That is how I ended up with the camera I shot this review with. Clay has since told me he was able to fix the original by harvesting components (something to do with resistors and transistors, the details of which I should probably learn) from a donor camera, which turned out to be an SLX. We will come back to that detail because it matters.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Rolleiflex 6006 Mod 2 on the bench, showing the body and the 80mm f2.8 lens]
The camera in context
The Rolleiflex 6006 sits in the middle of a family.
- Rolleiflex SLX, introduced 1976. The grandfather of the 6000 series.
- Rolleiflex 6006, introduced 1984. The first proper successor, adding interchangeable film backs and refined electronics.
- Rolleiflex 6006 Mod 2, launched 1989. This is what I have.
- Rolleiflex 6002 and Rolleiflex 6008 followed, with 6008 eventually taking the line into digital.
Production numbers, per Camera Wiki: roughly 8,000 Mod 1 6006s and around 6,000 Mod 2s. So somewhere around 13,000 6006s in total. That is not a tiny number, but it is small compared to a camera like the Bronica S2A or the Mamiya RB67. The survival rate from the 1980s is poor enough that the working population is probably closer to 2,000. We will come back to that detail too.
The whole 6000 series shares the same bayonet mount and the same Carl Zeiss lenses. Buy into one body and your lens collection is portable to the others. The lenses are well respected. They have a quirk: the front filter mount is a proprietary bayonet, which means none of my screw-in filters fit. Standard Rolleiflex experience.
The battery situation
This is the part that puts a lot of people off these cameras and is worth covering in detail.
The 6006, like the SLX before it and the Fuji GX680 in a different family, requires a proprietary NiCd battery to function. Without the battery, nothing happens. Original NiCd cells from the 80s are pretty much all dead by now. If you find a 6006 with its original battery, do not assume the battery will hold charge or do you any good.
The good news is that several outfits now offer renovated batteries, where the original case is opened, the dead NiCd cells removed, and either new NiCd or NiMH cells fitted. Mine has been renovated with new NiCd, which is handy because it means I can charge it on the original charger. If you have NiMH or lithium replacements inside, you should not use the original charger; you need to charge the cells individually or use a different charger.
There are also third-party battery contraptions on eBay. Mine has one of these as a spare: three lithium cells (look like 14500 or thereabouts, 2,500 mAh each, similar to a smaller 18650) fitted into an L-bracket holder shaped to fit the camera’s battery compartment. Less elegant but functional.
So the battery is a solvable problem. It used to be a deal-breaker. It is not anymore. Worth knowing.
![PLACEHOLDER: the battery options shown side by side: renovated original NiCd pack and a third-party lithium contraption]
The shoot
I took it to Bristol harbourside at 6am on a Saturday morning. The plan was to catch the sunrise. The sunrise did not fully cooperate (a band of heavy cloud just on the horizon), but the morning light that followed was lovely.
Three rolls.
Ilford FP4 first, because that was what was already in the camera. Wide shots of the harbour with the 80mm f2.8 standard lens, then on the ground for some close-ups of a seagull chewing on a cardboard box. I love a seagull. I do not really love a seagull. They are there, and they are easy.
I switched to the 150mm long lens halfway through, then back to the 80mm. The 80mm (50mm equivalent in 35mm terms) never quite makes me happy. I want something either wider or longer.
Kodak Gold 200 next, as the sun came up properly. Moved over to the cranes by the water and set up at a pinch point on a footpath, waiting for joggers to come past with the sun behind them. Bristol on a Saturday morning used to be crawling with joggers. The footfall was disappointingly low this time. The city has changed, or perhaps I picked the wrong corner.
Kodak Portra 160 for the last roll, because the Gold was struggling to hold the highlights as the sun got stronger.
The motor winder on this camera is properly fast. You fly through 12 frames without thinking. Two joggers passing in quick succession is one click, wind, second click before you have consciously decided you wanted both frames. That is a useful feature for street work, where the right moment is half a second wide and you do not want to be advancing the film manually.
![PLACEHOLDER: a Bristol harbourside frame from the FP4 roll, showing the early-morning light]
What I actually liked about it
A list, because I want to be fair to the camera.
The 6x6 frame, which is my preferred medium format aspect ratio.
The sound. A solid mechanical clunk from the shutter and a satisfying electric whir from the motor winder. I am a sucker for a good camera noise and the 6006 has one.
The Carl Zeiss lenses, which are as good as everybody says they are. The 80mm f2.8 and the 150mm long lens both produce lovely files (or rather, lovely negatives).
The motor winder speed, which I have already mentioned but which deserves repeating because it changes how you shoot. You can think faster than the camera can advance the film with most medium format SLRs. With the 6006 you can shoot two frames in the time it would take you to wind on a Bronica.
The interchangeable film backs. In principle, useful. Means you can switch between colour and black and white mid-shoot, or between two different ISOs.
Why I am selling it anyway
Three reasons, in increasing order of weight.
The trauma of the first one. Every time I fire the shutter on this working copy, I am listening for the grind. Every time I get near the end of a roll I tense up wondering if it is going to pull the film through. The previous camera permanently broke my trust in the model, and even with a clean working example I cannot relax. I am sure I would build confidence over time. But there is no good reason to invest that time when I have an alternative I already trust.
The redundancy with the SLX. I already own a Rolleiflex SLX. The SLX takes the same Carl Zeiss lenses. The SLX produces the same 12 frames of 6x6 negative. The only meaningful difference is the interchangeable backs on the 6006, and honestly, I almost never change backs mid-shoot. I have multiple backs for the S2A and the ETRS and I cannot remember the last time I left the house with more than one. So the back-swapping feature, while a real upgrade over the SLX on paper, is one I do not actually use.
The long-term survival risk. This is the one that makes the decision easy. The 6006 has more ambitious electronics than the SLX. More to go wrong. And the production numbers were small (13,000 ever made, maybe 2,000 surviving), so the donor-camera supply is finite and shrinking. The fact that Clay had to harvest parts from an SLX to fix my 6006 tells you something about where this is heading: in twenty years, working 6006s will be hard to find, because the electronics will be failing and the parts to fix them will be coming from cannibalised siblings. SLXs will outlast them on simpler electronics and better-supplied parts.
I have owned four SLXs in my life. All four worked. I have owned two 6006s. One worked. The dataset is small but the trend is suggestive.
So which one stays
Given two cameras that take the same lenses and produce the same negatives, which one would you sell? The one with the failure history, the smaller surviving population, the more complex electronics, and no use case unique to it. The 6006 goes. The SLX stays.
This is unfortunate because the 6006 is, objectively, a fractionally better camera than the SLX. It has the improved electronics, it has the interchangeable backs, it has marginally more refined ergonomics. But “fractionally better” is not enough when the alternative is one you trust, you already own, and you have four positive data points on.
A Rolleiflex SLX deep-dive is coming in due course because that is also on the chopping block, but for different reasons and with much more reluctance.
For now: the 6006 is a great camera, and if you are looking at one and you have not had my experience with one, you should consider buying it. The price-to-performance ratio is genuinely good and the Carl Zeiss lenses are a serious asset. Just budget for a battery rebuild and accept that you are shooting something with a finite long-term horizon.