This is a Tenax II, an interchangeable lens 35mm rangefinder camera made by Zeiss-Ikon in Dresden starting in 1938. It shot 24mm x 24mm square images on regular 35mm film and was created by famed designer Hubert Nerwin who previously designed the Contax rangefinder. It was an unusually designed camera…
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…
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…
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…
This is a Revere Eye-Matic EE 127, a fully automatic rangefinder camera that shoots square 4cm x 4cm images on 127 roll film. It was built by the Revere Camera Company of Chicago, IL, USA starting in 1958. This camera was one of the very first fully automatic “electric eye”…
This is a Canon IV Sb 35mm rangefinder camera, produced by the Canon Camera Corporation of Tokyo, Japan starting in December 1952. The IV Sb was the world’s first 35mm camera to support flash sync for both flash bulbs and electronic X-sync through Canon’s proprietary rail mounted flash shoe. It…
This is a Minolta Super A, an interchangeable lens 35mm rangefinder made by Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko K.K. starting in 1957. The name Super A suggests it’s part of the Minolta A-series of cameras which first debuted in 1955. Unlike the other A-series cameras, the Super A is much larger and…
This is a Taron Chic, a vertical half frame 35mm scale focus camera made by Taron Company Limited of Tokyo Japan starting in 1961. The Chic shoots 18mm x 24mm “half-frame” exposures on regular 35mm film. Unlike most half frame 35mm cameras, the film transports vertically, rather than horizontally which…
This is the Asahi Pentax, the very first 35mm SLR produced by the Asahi Optical Company of Japan to use a pentaprism viewfinder. The camera is often referred to as the Pentax AP by collectors even though that was never officially documented. The other camera is the Asahi Pentax K,…
This is a KMZ Narciss (Нарцисс), a 16mm sub-miniature SLR camera produced by Krasnogorsky Mekhanichesky Zavod in Krasnogorsk, Russia between the years of 1961 and 1965. The Narciss produces 14mm x 21mm exposures on unperforated 16mm film loaded into specialized cassettes made specifically for the Narciss. Despite it’s diminutive size,…
This is the Argus C-series. First released in 1938 as the Argus Model C, the C-series includes the best selling American camera ever made, the Argus C3. Over 2.2 million were produced over the course of 28 years, the C-series saw many subtle variations and incremental improvements, but generally retained…
