Early in 2022, on a whim, I wrote an article titled, My Favorite Film Cameras: 2022. I’m not sure what, exactly, prompted me to write it, apart from just obsessing over cameras — my passion running over as my collection of cameras continued to grow. Since then, the collection has only continued to grow, although now, in mid-2023, the pace of expansion has slowed nearly to a stop. In part, that’s because I’m focusing more attention on actually using my cameras, but moreover, it’s just getting to the point where I’ve experienced all the cameras I really ever sought to experience. Any remaining in the “yet-to-be-experienced” group are, at this point, simply too expensive to justify buying. This includes any Leica you care to name, a more recent Rolleiflex than the one I already own, a Mamiya 7, a Pentax 67, and maybe a handful of others.
As I thought about updating the list for 2023, the challenge of whittling-down and sorting it to just ten examples became became an impossible task. The more I thought about it, the more clear it became that my “favorites” can easily be segmented by type, and within each, there’s an obvious stratification.
Additionally, it feels like the resulting list isn’t likely to change in the future — hence the phrase in the title, “The Evergreen Edition?”. I did put a question mark at the end because, well, who knows. For the moment, I’ll just call this my 2023 list.
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