This long, wonderfully illustrated, article (12+ pages), which appeared in the September 1954 issue of Popular Photography, explains everything important to know about SLRs—as of 1954, that is. The first recognizably modern 35mm SLR, the Pentax Original, was still three years away. Automatic exposure and automatic focus were far into the future.

To give you an idea of how early 1954 was, only one of the 12 SLRs pictured, the Asahiflex IIb/Tower 23, was Japanese. In five years the Japanese would start to take over the market, with quality, features, and price, while the German makers sat on their laurels. After all, in 1954, as the article makes clear, their lead was seemingly insurmountable.

I have five of the eight 35mm SLRs pictured in the article, if you count my Contax S as more-or-less the same as the Pentacon pictured. The other four are the Asahiflex IIb/Tower 23, the Contaflex, the Exa, and the Exakta VX. I'd love to get a Rectaflex, too, but they're too rare and too expensive.

Interestingly, the Asahiflex is called only by its Sears name and is nowhere cited in the text of the article. Its huge advantage over the other 35mm SLRs pictured, an instant-return mirror, isn't even mentioned. Perhaps the authors didn't know about the Tower 23's mirror, any more than they knew who made it. (The first Tower 23 was an Asahiflex Ia, and Sears kept the model number when they switched to a IIb, so another theory is that the authors had seen only the first Tower 23.)

Awkwardly, the two types of SLRs are called "prism" and "mirror", even though the mirror part is identical in both. Today we would call them prism and waist-level. Of course, within a few years of the article's printing, the only 35mm SLRs with waist-level finders would be those with removable finders; prism finders would be the norm. But 1954 was only five years after the first SLR with a prism finder, the Contax S.

These quirks aside, the article is fascinating documentation of the state of SLRs in 1954. It emphasizes the four principal advantages of the SLR: no parallax, depth-of-field preview, close-up photography, and the use of long lenses. The rangefinder, which dominated 35mm photography at that time, was weak, even useless, in all four areas. But in 1954 it wasn't yet clear that the much-more-complex SLRs would be taken seriously and become mainstream. Within five years the Pentax Original and, especially, the Nikon F, would resolve the matter. In the 1960s, SLRs would even become inexpensive. (The 1954 Exa was already inexpensive, but much too limited.)

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(Scroll down for continuation of text.) Continuation of text from first page (magazine page 36):

Continuation of text on interchangeabe lenses (page 43):

Continuation of text on close-up photography (page 45):

Continuation of text on portraits (page 46):