bringing my Electro35 back to life

[ywenz]

I'm attempting to shoot with my Electro35 again which as been shelved for over a year. I forget - Since the camera is an AV only, the whole point of the exposure lights is to indicate whether the MAX or MIN shutter speed is not enough for the current aperture I've selected? So if I shoot in normal situations where the camera will not go outside its range of shutter speeds, then I don't need to pay attention to the lights at all?

I'm doing the battery mod today. Hopefully it'll work out..

[sevo]

Almost. The yellow arrow lights up if you are beyond hand-holdable speed (IIRC 1/30s) - the Electro 35s can handle another whopping nine to eleven EV beyond that point, so that you are more likely to run out of focus vision or into reciprocity errors than into their lower limits. Red, on the other hand, is the instant threshold to overexposure, which won't matter much for one f stop or two when shooting B&W and even for three or four stops on modern consumer CN stock, but should be strictly avoided when shooting slide.

[ywenz]

Thanks.. I guess there no way to telling how the meter is short of shooting a test roll...

[sevo]

You can verify that the thresholds towards the lights match another camera or external meter. It is usually at 1/30 for yellow (but 1/15 on the CC!), and AFAIK generally past 1/500 for red.

[blw]

Or put another way, 1/500th is the fastest shutter speed on the camera. Set the ISO to 200 open the aperture up to F8 and then open the aperture more while holding down the shutter plunger. If the red light comes on after one or two clicks (5.6 and 4 respectively) then the meter is probably right. Of course, you could also set it to 400 and open up from F16 and expect similar results. Ditto exponentially for other ISOs.

[ywenz]

Just compared it against my other camera and the Yashica seems to be pretty accurate!

The shutter contacts to activate the meter is a bit suspect though... is it easy to clean that up?