Alpa Si 2000 (1977)
Alpa, the brand name of the Swiss camera manufacturer Pignons S A, is a marque synonymous with luxury-level quality. Alpa SLRs – like the handmade Alpa 11 series of the early 1970s – were all-manual and highly engineered, with their own proprietary lens mount. They were the discerning choice for those with deep pockets.
Few would have expected the Swiss company to come out with an aperture-priority SLR with an electronically controlled shutter, but that’s exactly what they released in 1977.
The rapid automation of Japanese SLRS in the early 1970s had made SLRs like Pignons’ Alpa 11 look decidedly old-fashioned; and there comes a point where even luxury has to adapt. The Swiss company chose to give its brand an update by rolling out a stylish new SLR at the 1977 edition of the Photokina trade show in Cologne, West Germany: the Alpa Si 2000.
The Si 2000 is a large SLR, with an angular pentaprism prominent shutter button – completely unlike anything the Swiss brand had released before. Pignons tackled the camera’s about turn from their usual range with an advert stressing its affordability – and the fact that it wasn’t really an Alpa camera at all.
“Until now, not everyone who has wanted an Alpa 35mm SLR camera has been able to have one,” the ad read. “Hand-built, one by one, by Swiss craftsmen, they have been available only to a limited number of photographers. Now you can join that select group with the new Alpa Si 2000, a medium-priced SLR of Alpa quality. To make it possible, Alpa has combined traditional Swiss craftsmanshp with the production ingenuity of Japan.”
The Alpa’s resemblance to Japanese SLRs was no mistake: Pignons had indeed gone to one of them, Chinon, and enlisted their expertise. The Si 2000 was a Swiss-badged version of the CE II Memotron, albeit with a few tweaks at the Swiss camera-maker’s request.
The Si 2000 sported a zinc top plate that was more resistant to bumps and knocks, just as other camera producers were going for cheaper, lighter die-cast metals and plastics. It had mushroom-style strap lugs for side-on fasteners instead of the normal (read cheaper) O-rings, as well as changes to outside elements such as the wind-on lever. Otherwise, the camera was essentially a CE II, the second model in Chinon’s ingenious attempt to make a camera that could shoot aperture-priority with almost any M42 lens.
Like the Memotrons, the Alpa acts like an aperture-priority SLR, but is in fact an instantaneous stop-down SLR. The camera allows open-aperture operation with the right lenses, and stops the lens down to the selected aperture for a split second as the shutter is pressed. The camera then chooses the correct shutter speed – anything from two seconds to 1/2000 for the correct exposure. The camera’s vertically travelling metal shutter is electronically controlled, with stepless speeds – if the camera thinks that it needs 1/183 of a second for the correct exposure, then that’s what it will choose.
Pignons’ gamble didn’t pay off. The Si 2000, despite being well-made and being released with a number of excellent (Japan-made) Auto Alpa-branded lenses, had one major flaw: it couldn’t use any of the high-end proprietary lenses that had made the original Alpa cameras so desirable. Alpa purists were perhaps not impressed that such a refined company was dipping its toes into the electronic era.
“The metamorphosis from Chinon to Alpa was accomplished through a few deft changes on the outside of the camera. Brilliant marketing idea or an own-goal against the image of a superior brand?” Alpa’s own website asks of this single-camera foray into the screw-mount world.
The Si 2000 – rare enough to fetch a few hundred dollars for the body alone if you are lucky enough to find one – remains one of the most collectable cameras from this vast system.
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I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
