35 mm Bessa
family of cameras is manufactured by Cosina
The Bessa family of cameras was manufactured in Japan by Cosina as a revival of the Voigtländer brand name between 1999 and 2015.
Models
Every Cosina Voigtländer Bessa camera has a double focal-plane shutter with two sets of curtains to prevent damage by the sun. Shutter speeds range from 1 to 1⁄2000 s and bulb (B), with flash sync at 1⁄125 s on hot-shoe or PC terminal. They all have TTL exposure metering, and manual exposure controls; models with an "A" suffix (e.g., R2A, R3A, R4A) also have an aperture priority automatic mode.
Bessa-L and Bessa-T (finderless)
The first model was the Bessa-L, introduced in 1999. This was a finderless body with a Leica screw mount, and operation and specifications similar to SLRs built by Cosina for other brands, such as the Nikon FM10, Olympus OM-2000, and Ricoh KR-5. It was introduced with a range of Voigtländer 39 mm screw lenses that were quite inexpensive and said to be of excellent quality. It could of course mount all the wide variety of 39 mm screw lenses by manufacturers as diverse as Leica, Canon, Nikon and even cheaper but often excellent Soviet lenses.
The Bessa-L was mostly intended to be used with ultra wide angle lenses, with which the absence of a focusing device is not a problem. Most notably Voigtländer introduced a 15 mm and a 12 mm lens, the latter being the widest rectilinear full-frame lens ever marketed up to then.
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This entry incorporates text from “35 mm Bessa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.