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Swedish Army Three crowns Elmar on regular IIIg


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Hello, I just bought this camera.

 

There are no military markings on the body, only on the lens.

 

The seller claims that the army used the camera just like this but I have not heard of any non-black Swedish army IIIg cameras. The lens serial number is from the series for the black cameras. The camera serial number is earlier than the black ones.

 

Have you heard of any cameras like this or do you think someone just took the lens from a black camera body and put in on a regular IIIg?

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Hello, I just bought this camera.

 

...do you think someone just took the lens from a black camera body and put in on a regular IIIg?

 

Seems to me a reasonable hipotesis... could be that some black IIIG of the famous "3 crowns batch" has gone damaged or broken or lost... weren't they used in military environments, after all ? Elmar survived and reached the market... interesting lens, anyway...

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Luigi, I'll second your hypothesis. The camera is clearly a perfectly normal IIIg, and someone is trying--or has been trying--to palm it off as a military model, on the strength of the (legitimate) lens.

 

With one mint exception, which does not seem to have been issued at all, all the admittedly few specimens of the black Three Crowns IIIg I have seen have been very well used indeed.

 

The old man from Just That Age

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Thanks for the replies!

 

So, the body was replaced as I suspected. The replacement was probably early because I have the history from early ´60s when the camera was used in the army and retired in 1980 from service. It was mostly used in the photo dept studio for staff pictures, hence the very clean condition of both camera and lens.

 

Regards,

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These cameras are usually referred to as 'Army' cameras, but when I encountered them first I heard that they had actually been used by the Air Force, as hand cameras for use in the Saab A32 Lansen attack aircraft. These got into the Force at the same time as I did ... But I have never been able to confirm this.

 

The old man from the Age of Piston Engines

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Gunnar,

what I can tell today is that, what was listed in the commercial IIIg production serial number, stops at 888495 and restart at 888501.

This means that, as all the Army delivered products were not publicaly listed, as they were considered as a defense secret.

So 5 IIIg, including your 888496, were delivered to the (Swedish) Army in 1958.

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Hello JC!

 

Thanks for the news, very exciting and interesting! I got a very honest impression from the seller and this means that he was 100% correct in his description of the cameras history.

 

Best regards,

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