It's the S2 that had the delicate film advance. The S2A was redesigned, with nitrided gear teeth for better hardness, and a redesigned locking mechanism that engaged on three teeth rather than a single tooth. I'm not saying King Kong couldn't strip it, you understand, but it's much, much less likely to be a problem area on the S2A. I used mine pretty roughly for a number of years and never had any problems with it at all.
And yes, the lenses were very nice. I had all three of the ones in this outfit. In many ways the nicest was the 135 -- great for headshots and full-length portraiture.
Before everyone goes trooping off to buy old Bronicas, though, make sure you know what you're getting into. A Bronica S shutter doesn't exactly release, or even fire -- "detonate" or "erupt" is more like it. The thing was plenty hefty, so it didn't jump around in your hand, but you, and everyone else in the room, definitely knew when it went off.
You'd hardly expect otherwise, considering all the stuff that went on when you pressed the release. The old Bronicas had an extra-long reflex mirror, which was nice because you didn't get mirror cutoff with teles, and it returned instantly after each exposure, a feature the Hasselblad 500C didn't have.
But to get those two features, while still allowing the use of wide-angle lenses without mirror lockup, the thing had one of the looniest firing cycles ever designed into a reflex camera. The mirror panel was suspended at its four corners by little rollers that ran in curved tracks cut in the sides of the mirror box. When you pressed the release, you energized a spring-loaded roller -- like a window-shade roller -- that ran transversely across the bottom of the camera. This roller rolled up a cloth tape, the other end of which was glued to the back of the mirror panel, so the rolling action pulled the rear upper edge of the mirror downward.
This caused the mirror to lie down flat, shiny side up, on the bottom of the mirror box, its front edge sliding neatly forward on its tracks to avoid whacking the back end of any wide-angle lens that might be poking in. Of course, you couldn't leavve that shiny mirror exposed where stray light would bounce off it -- so a thin, spring-loaded metal baffle, normally held vertically against the back of the camera by the back edge of the mirror, hinged down on top of it.
Meanwhile, to stop light from pouring in through the exposed focusing screen and fogging the film, a fabric blind on another roller -- normally rolled up against the upper front edge of the mirror box -- would unroll to cover it, pulled by strings that ran around pulleys and attached to the upper rear edge of the mirror.
Finally, after all that hullabaloo, plus the diaphragm stopping down, the conventional cloth focal-plane shutter would do its thing. Once it had fired, the window-shade roller was unlocked, allowing another spring to pull the mirror back up to the viewing position and reversing all the other stuff.
This doesn't have anything to do with rangefinder cameras -- except maybe to make you appreciate their simplicity and quietness -- but it's so ingenious and bizarre that I just had to try to describe it. If you ever get to see an S2-series Bronica in the flesh, remove the focusing mount (built in, but removable via a huge outer bayonet) and watch it fire a few times for yourself.
What's really amazing about all this spring/string/roller/pulley stuff is that it all actually worked quite well, aside from the prolonged din while it was firing, and on the S2A it was usually rather dependable as well!
But I figured someone here might need a good MF SLR and give it a good home.
