Mamiya 528AL: worst camera ever made

I recently picked up a Mamiya 528AL for a couple Euro's at a flea market. My curiosity was triggered by the fact that it was an SLR, but with a leaf shutter.

The camera didn't function, but I managed to repair it. It was the most complicated camera repair I ever attempted. The mechanics of the camera are very complex. To expose an image the following steps need to be executed in the correct order:
- the shutter needs to close (since it's an SLR it is open in the normal position)
- the mirror needs to flip up
- the diaphragm needs to close
- the shutter needs to open
- the shutter needs to close
- the diaphragm needs top open
- the mirror needs to flip down
- the shutter needs to open again

This whole sequence is commanded by a ring around the shutter assembly with various nooks and crannies. If anything doesn't work smooth, you miss an exposure: the mirror will flip up and down, but the shutter will not have closed and opened, resulting in a blurry 10x overexposed image.

In the end I got it working again. Even the light meter for the aperture priority mode and the flash are functional again. But when I ran it's first roll through it, I was very disappointed. The camera is rubbish. The lens is no better than what you get on a cheap plastic compact. In fact, I have taken razor sharp images with a plastic Yashica MF-3, but the Mamiya is only good for dreamy (euphemism for unsharp) portraits.

Most of the images on my roll of 24 were either badly overexposed or unsharp. I saved only 12 usable images from this roll. In fact, I didn't even bother to wait for the negatives to flatten, hence the moiré you see in some of the images (from the negative touching the scanner glass).

The rest of the images is available on Google+.