Zeiss Historica Spring 2001 Prototype lenses for three different Zeiss cameras, a look back at Carl Paul Goerz and his contributions to early Zeiss-Ikon and more of the story of how Zeiss-Ikon moved from Dresden to Kiev, Ukraine. Pg 2. Prototype Lenses for the Contax, Contaflex, and Contarex. It should come…
Zeiss Historica Spring 2000 The Spring 2000 issue brings us several unusual Zeiss cameras, pre-Zeiss cameras, and an in depth look as to why wide angle lenses were so difficult for the Contax. Pg 2. Pre-Zeiss Ikon Camera Design. Zeiss Ikon was founded in 1926 after merging 4 Dresden area optical…
Zeiss Historica Spring 2013 The Spring 2013 issue has Ottos, Ghisettis, Cavinas, and Benjamins along with detailed write-ups about the Werra, Aseros, and the Zeiss Planar. That’s a lot of Zeiss! Pg 2. While the Tessar might be Zeiss’s most popular lens design, the Planar is not only older, but…
Earlier this week, I posted my take on the Zeiss-Ikon Contarex “Bullseye”. Feedback to that article has been very good with most people who’ve handled it before, agreed with my assessment that while it was a pretty camera with an amazing Rube-Goldberg-like complexity, it wasn’t a very good user. Sometimes,…
This is the Contarex, a professional grade 35mm SLR camera produced by Zeiss-Ikon starting in 1960. This first generation Contarex earned the nickname “Bullseye” for the large prominent circular exposure meter above the lens. The Contarex was one of the first West German SLRs with a focal plane shutter, and…
For the first 50 editions of my Keppler’s Vault series, I’ve brought to you articles from the late 1940s through the late 1960s from a variety of publications on topics that I thought were interesting enough to share. So with this, the 51st edition of Keppler’s Vault, you might think…
Today marks the 65th Anniversary of the release of Kodak Tri-X black and white film, in 35mm, 120, and 620 roll film formats. Tri-X was a film that at the time of it’s release was one of the fastest black and white emulsions ever made, and allowed photographers to take…
Another Halloween, another Cameras of the Dead article. This year, as I browsed through my ever growing collection of broken cameras, I started to see a pattern. While sure, I have my fair share of broken Japanese, American, and Soviet cameras, but I’m starting to see more and more European…
This is a Ricoh Diacord L, a twin lens reflex medium format camera, made by Riken Optical Industries LTD starting in 1957. The Diacord was the name of the export model and the L suffix indicated that it had an uncoupled selenium light meter for exposure measurement. The Diacord L…
In an age of never-ending comparisons, “which product is best for me”, “should I buy product A over product B”, and “top 10 products to buy for blah blah blah”, consumers are constantly in search for the best of everything. For photographers, gear is often the product to which we…
This is a Voigtländer Ultramatic CS, a 35mm SLR camera made by Voigtländer Braunschweig AG starting in 1965. The Ultramatic CS was the top of the line model in Voigtländer’s leaf shutter SLR lineup, starting with the lower cost Bessamatic. The Ultramatic CS was the first leaf shutter SLR with…
In last week’s Keppler’s Vault, we talked about the concept of a Beam Splitter Reflex in which an SLR viewfinder is designed to use an optical device called a beam splitter that would both pass light through to the film plane and up into the viewfinder without any moving parts. …
