The Kowa SER was produced from 1965 to 1970. It is a 35mm SLR camera with a coupled CdS meter. The camera was capable of using ASA 10 to 800 film and has shutter speeds of 1 to 1/500th of a second. The interchangeable lenses (Kowa proprietary mount) have a fully automatic diaphragm and is coupled to the cameras built-in CdS light meter plus shutter. The single action film right thumb advance lever makes it easy to ready yourself for the next shot. When new the camera came with a 6x4 inch 28 page manual, camera strap, and an f2 50mm Kowa SER lens mounted on it with a focus range from 2.5 feet to infinity (0.76m to infinity). Kowa insisted on using leaf shutters when pretty much every other Japanese maker (and many Germans) were using focal-plane shutters. The big advantage to leaf shutters is that you get flash-sync at all speeds, whereas focal-plane shutters of the 1960s usually topped out at 1/60th or 1/90th of a second. Kowa is a Japanese company, which manufactured cameras from 1954 to 1978. It continued to make binoculars, telescopes and medical optics (among much else), and in 2005 marketed a "spotting scope TD-1" with integrated digital camera, thereby again becoming a camera manufacturer of a sort but in early 2009 this was discontinued also.