>>3368590Not him but I have a Canon P as well (seems very popular in /fgt/ I assume because it’s well built and a magnitude cheaper than a Leica M3/4). The shutter speeds to watch out for are 15, 30, and 60. My 60 is good, my 15 and 30 are broken and fire at random speeds even after servicing. These (15 and 30 almost for sure — unsure about X which is 1/50 or so on a Canon P, and 60) speeds are “slow speeds” and use a different shutter mechanism assembly than the fast speeds. At least that’s my understanding. It’s like that in old cameras and even in newer large format lenses or leaf lenses for medium format — you need a long spring for slow speeds with resistance mechanisms, and for fast speeds you’re usually flicking some small curved piece of metal on triggering instead of the spring, with the fastest speeds doing so with no resistance applied to the curved metal piece and the slowest “fast” speed (1/125) usually with some resistance piece. That’s an oversimplification of course.
The issue with 15-60 is that they are the fastest “slow” speeds and while 60 is almost always going to be perfect since it’s the slowest speed most people will use, 15 and 30 tend to be mechanically More complex. This is true of 1/2, 1/4 etc. as well, but being off by 1/15 of a second on these speeds is barely noticeable. On 15 and 30 they are intolerable. A CLA doesn’t necessarily fix a problem with these speeds and if they’re broken it’s cost effective to just not use them rather than repair imo.
Fast speeds on old cameras? Well, for starters, 1/1000 is not going to be 1/1000 and that’s not the cameras fault. Cameras from the 50s/60s assured that middle speeds would be within 1/4th a stop of their stated speed, but fast and very slow speeds may be much more than that off. Usually the slow side of the spectrum is fine, since 1.1 seconds is really tolerable for 1 second exposures.
