This is a Pentacon Super, a 35mm SLR made by Kombinat VEB Pentacon Dresden between the years 1968 and 1972. The Pentacon Super was the sole attempt by Pentacon to build a professional level SLR. It had a number of features such as an interchangeable metered prism, open aperture metering,…
In the early days of still photography, the idea of a variable focal length lens was fantasy. Since the dawn of photography, lens designers, engineers, and mathematicians worked at calculating optical formulas to correct for astigmatism, coma, spherical aberrations, and a vast number of other optical anomalies in lenses of…
This is a Fujifilm GF670 Professional, a folding dual format medium format rangefinder camera, jointly made by Cosina and Fujifilm of Japan. The Fujifilm GF670 went on sale in March 2010 and was one of the very last Fujifilm cameras and shoots both 6cm x 6cm and 6cm x 7cm…
This is an Ilford Witness, a 35mm rangefinder camera made in 1953 by Peto Scott Electrical Instruments for Ilford of London, England. The Witness was a very ambitious camera, first designed in 1947 by ex employees of Leitz and Zeiss-Ikon. It incorporated a unique hybrid screw/bayonet lens mount, focal plane…
This is a Paxette Reflex Automatic, a 35mm single lens reflex camera made by Braun Nurnberg in Nuremberg, West Germany between the years 1958 and 1960. The Braun Paxette Automatic was an SLR version of the long running Braun Paxette series which consisted of a confusing number of scale focus…
This is the Sport (Спорт), a 35mm Single Lens Reflex camera made by Gosudarstvennyi Optiko-Mekhanicheskii Zavod (GOMZ for short) near Leningrad, Russia between the years 1935 and 1941. The GOMZ Sport is an evolution of an earlier prototype camera called the Gelveta. The GOMZ Sport is credited as the Soviet…
This is a Steinheil Casca II, a 35mm rangefinder camera made by C. A. Steinheil Söhne in Munich, West Germany starting in 1949. It was an update to the original Casca I from 1948 adding a coupled rangefinder, a new lens mount, and having a few other changes. The Casca…
When Oskar Barnack completed the first Leica prototype in the mid 1920s, his goal was to make a high quality compact camera that could make high quality images using double perforated 35mm film. At the time, the idea of a mass produced 35mm camera was one that nobody was thinking…
This is a Panda DF, a 35mm single lens reflex camera made by the Harbin Electric Meter Instrument Factory in the city of Harbin of the People’s Republic of China between the years 1975 and 1979. The Panda is very closely related to the Seagull DF-1 produced by the Shanghai…
This is the Yashica YF, a 35mm rangefinder camera made by Yashica Co., Ltd. in Japan starting in 1959. The Yashica YF was built very shortly after Yashica’s acquisition of Nicca the year before and although credited to Yashica, is a mostly cosmetic refresh of Nicca’s earlier type III rangefinders. …
This is a Nikon 28Ti, a premium point and shoot 35mm camera made in Japan by the Nikon Corporation starting in 1994. The Nikon 28Ti was the follow-up to the Nikon 35Ti from the year prior, widening the focal length to 28mm and adding a new flash mode and all…
This is a Wrayflex Ia, a 35mm SLR camera made by Wray Optical Works Ltd. in Bromley, London, UK between the years 1953 and 1958. The Wrayflex Ia is an update to the original Wrayflex I whose only change was that it exposed 24mm x 36mm images instead of 24mm…
