I had been threatening to review the Rolleiflex SLX for about a year before I actually got round to it. Threatening is the right word. Every time I picked the camera up to take it out, I changed my mind about where to go with it. The SLX is the kind of camera that demands a worthy shoot. Walking the dog and putting a roll through it felt slightly insulting. The camera had been bought on a viewer recommendation from a regular commenter called Clay Coalfield, which is the kind of nudge you take seriously, and once a camera arrives off the back of a recommendation like that you owe it a decent run-out. Clay, if you are reading, the camera was worth it.
So this is the long-promised write up. What the SLX is, what it does well, what is wrong with it and how I got on with it through three test shoots once I had decided to stop overthinking the matter.
What the SLX actually is
The Rolleiflex SLX is a medium format SLR introduced by Rollei in 1976, and the camera that effectively replaced the much-loved but quite different SL66 in the company’s main line. Rollei’s twin lens reflexes had a long and solid reputation by then. The SL66 had been their attempt at a serious 6x6 SLR for the studio. The SLX was something else. It was conceived as a fully electronic camera that would compete head on with the Hasselblad 500 series. The headline features were shutter-priority auto exposure with through-the-lens metering, plus a built-in motor wind that did all the film advance work for you. You set the ISO, you set the shutter speed, you compose, you press the button. The camera does the rest.
The SLX was the first of a long electronic Rollei medium format line that ran for nearly thirty years. The original SLX got a quiet update in 1978 that the world has come to call the SLX Mark II, though Rollei never officially marketed it as such. The updates were mostly internal reliability improvements. You can distinguish a Mark II from the eye by the black trim plate around the power dial (it replaced a chrome one) and a cable release fitting between the two shutter buttons on the bottom. Mine is a Mark II. The original SLX was discontinued in 1979. The Mark II continued through 1985, when the 6006 took over and started the proper Rolleiflex 6000 series that ran into the 2000s.
A footnote that I should have got right on camera. In the video I said Rollei made the first autofocus medium format camera in the early 2000s. They did make one, the 6008 AF released in 2002, but they were not first. The Pentax 645N had medium format autofocus in 1997. The Mamiya 645 AF and Contax 645 AF both arrived in 1999. Rollei were very late to that party.
How it actually shoots
The SLX is a waist level finder SLR with a leaf shutter inside the lens. The shutter itself is whisper-quiet, as leaf shutters tend to be. What you hear when you press the release is the mirror crashing out of the way. Unlike the Bronica S2A where the mirror slides downward in a slightly idiosyncratic way, the SLX has a conventional mirror that lifts upward. The mirror slap is very loud, which is mostly about the spring tension required to clear the mirror box quickly enough not to interrupt the shutter. With the camera on a tripod and the shutter released, the entire camera body jumps.
The exposure system is shutter priority. You set the ISO on the rotating wheel on the body and you set the shutter speed on a second wheel. If the lens is set to auto on the front collar, the camera meters through the lens and selects an aperture for you. There is a manual override on the lens collar if you want to take the aperture back yourself. Focus is always manual. The waist level finder gives you a bright ground glass to focus through, and there is a flip up magnifier for fine work.
The motor wind is the SLX’s party trick. There is no film advance lever and no winding crank. Once you have fired the shutter, the camera advances the film by itself. In single-shot mode it gets you to the next frame instantly. In continuous mode, if you hold the shutter release down, the camera will run through a full roll of 120 in about eight seconds. Twelve frames of 6x6 in eight seconds. At ten pounds a roll of FP4 you can put a serious dent in your film budget if you are not careful.
The battery problem
The elephant in the room. The SLX runs on a proprietary nickel cadmium 10 volt rechargeable battery that fits into a slot on the side of the camera. There is no AA option and no override. If the battery is dead the camera is a brick.
The original 1970s NiCd cells are mostly dead now, which is what 1970s NiCd cells do. I have been lucky with the camera I bought. The batteries that came with it still hold a respectable charge, which is unusual for a fifty-year-old NiCd. Most people who get into an SLX will need to deal with this.
There are essentially two routes if your batteries are dead. The cleanest is a commercial rebuild service. DHW Fototechnik in Germany, the successor company to Rollei, will rebuild the battery cases with modern NiMH cells that have roughly double the original capacity. The same service is available from Rolleiflex USA on the other side of the Atlantic for buyers nearer there. The other route is DIY. The iFixit guide for swapping in LiFePO4 cells yourself doubles the runtime again but requires a lithium-capable charger and a willingness to solder. Whichever route you take, expect to spend somewhere around a hundred pounds per battery, plus the cost of shipping if it has to cross a border. Plan for at least two batteries so you always have a charged spare.
Shoot one: Gertie
I was impatient. I had been threatening the SLX shoot for so long that when I finally had film in the camera I wanted to put a roll through it immediately, before I had a worthy subject lined up. So I set the camera on a tripod in my studio with a cable release attached and shot a roll of self portraits with the only available collaborator I had in the room.
Gertie has been in the studio for years. She is a mannequin. She has never complained about the lighting and she does not blink. She gets pulled into photographs more often than is probably reasonable.
Self portraits on a waist level finder are technically straightforward but rapidly become a comedy of focus errors, since you cannot see the ground glass from the side of the camera you are posing on. I worked round it by pre-focusing on the chair and then sitting in it. The cable release lives under my heel during the exposure. Bulb mode means I have a long enough window to get my head in approximately the right place before the shutter closes.
The roll came back with a few keepers and a lot of fascinating shots of an empty chair where my head was supposed to be. The keepers were better than I expected. The leaf shutter and the auto exposure system delivered properly even tonal range across the frame. When the SLX nails the focus, the negatives are sharp in a way that is not always true of older cameras at this price point.
Shoot two: Andy at Ironwood Jones
Once I had the camera operating reliably I went looking for a worthy subject. Some friends of mine in Somerset, Bev and Andy, run a woodworking business out of a yard called Ironwood Jones. Andy works mostly with reclaimed wood and steel, much of which gets pulled from skips and demolition sites by permission. The yard itself is an extravaganza of texture, to use a phrase I leant on a bit too heavily on camera. Old timber, rusted iron, weathered tools and the kind of light that a workshop in winter generates. Very photogenic.
I shot a roll of Lomography Color Negative 100 first, taking advantage of the camera’s shutter priority mode for some quick exposures of Andy at work with a planer. The light was low and the SLX picked the right apertures consistently. I also did a few frames manually with a handheld meter for comparison. The onboard meter and the handheld meter agreed within half a stop, which is about as well as a fifty-year-old TTL system can be expected to do.
I switched to FP4 for some portraits outside in the yard. Andy on his chair in the doorway, and a couple of frames of him posed against a wall of tools and reclaimed timber. The FP4 came back more contrasty than I would normally expect of that emulsion. I either over-developed or got carried away with development time. The negatives still look good though, and some of the frames I am genuinely pleased with. Andy’s YouTube channel, Ironwood Jones, is worth a subscribe if you are interested in what someone with forty-five years of woodworking can do with reclaimed materials and a small Somerset workshop.
Shoot three: the kitchen
The third shoot was the most utilitarian. I needed a new YouTube profile photo. The one I had been using was about three years old and the beard had been through about four iterations since. So I set the camera up in the kitchen with the Pro 400H loaded and good window light coming through. I leaned against a wall and tripped the shutter remotely.
The Pro 400H came out as Pro 400H always does. Warm tones and well-controlled grain. Exactly the colour balance I needed for a photo I would be sitting next to on YouTube for the next few years. One of the frames did the job.
Verdict
I have kept the SLX. This is not always the case for cameras I review. The Mamiya C330 went on eBay within weeks of its review piece on the channel because I felt nothing when I clicked through the negatives. The Fuji GW690iii went later for cash flow reasons that hurt at the time. The SLX has stayed. Part of that is that the negatives are excellent and the camera is pleasant to handle. Mostly though it is that the camera does something distinct: medium format with the workflow of a modern motor-driven SLR, on negatives that are big enough to print large.
There are caveats. The battery situation is a real concern. The original cells are mostly dead and even rebuilt batteries have a finite life. Owning an SLX is a commitment to keeping the batteries serviceable. The electronics, while revolutionary in 1976, are primitive by modern standards. There are reports of mirror-mechanism failures and of meter drift. The metering electronics can also give up entirely. I have not seen any of this with mine yet, which I attribute to luck rather than skill.
Used SLX prices vary widely. I have seen offers between two hundred and six hundred pounds for the same model in similar condition, depending on who is selling and who is buying. The Mark II tends to fetch slightly more for the better electronics but you can find perfectly usable ones in the lower end of that range if you are patient. There is no consensus on what these cameras are worth. The market is genuinely confused. If you are willing to wait for the right copy at the right price, you can get a very capable medium format SLR for not very much money.
Would I recommend you buy one? Yes, with the battery caveat firmly in mind. If you can find an SLX with batteries that still hold a respectable charge, or you are willing to budget for a rebuild straight away, the camera is genuinely worth the trouble. The auto-winding and the leaf shutter alone are good reasons to keep using it. The 6x6 negative is another. The mannequin in the studio is happy to model for the test rolls.