Univex Mercury

The body design in Mercury is so unique. Both this camera, and Olympus Pen-F use a rotary shutter, and are both half frame cameras. The camera was designed by George Kende, who had earlier developed an 8 mm motion picture camera using a rotary shutter. He used that experience to design the Mercury shutter. The shutter consists of two sectored discs that are locked together while they are released. Since the rotational speed of the disc is constant during the exposure, the shutter speed is only determined by the slit opening angle. It is capable of reliably delivering shutter speeds from 1/30 to 1/1000 second. This as a top speed among focal plane shutters of its time.