Cameras made in Germany (West or East)
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 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…
Back in October 2017, as part of the 4th edition of my Cameras of the Dead series, I wrote a short review about a compact 127 roll film camera called the Ising Puck. The Puck was an interesting little camera made by a small German company called Ising, who at…
This is an Ambi Silette, a 35mm interchangeable lens rangefinder camera made by AGFA Camera-Werk AG Muenchen between the years 1957 and 1961. Upon it’s release, the Ambi Silette was AGFA’s top of the line 35mm camera and would be the best featured rangefinder model they would ever make. Featuring…
This is an Exa 1c, a 35mm SLR camera sold under the name Ihagee, but manufactured by Certo Camera Werk in Dresden, East Germany, who at the time were both part of VEB Pentacon. The Exa 1c was produced for less than three years and was the last in the…
This is a Thowe Thowette, a compact rigid bodied camera that shoots 3cm x 4.5cm images on 127 format roll film. It was built by a Dresden area based company called Thowe for some years in the late 1920s through the early 1930s. Very little is known about Thowe other…
This is a Baldessa Ib, a 35mm rangefinder made by Balda Kamera-Werk in Bünde, West Germany starting in 1958. This was the third, and best featured of the original Baldessa lineup, improving upon lesser Baldessas with a coupled rangefinder and uncoupled selenium exposure meter. The camera was well built, but…
This is an Ihagee Auto-Ultrix type 2850, an auto-erecting folding camera made by Ihagee Kamerawerk, Steenbergen & Co. Dresden between the years 1932 and 1939. The Auto-Ultrix family had many variants, but the type 2850 produced eight 4cm x 6.5cm images on 127 format roll film. This particular example was…
This is a Rolleiflex Standard K2 Twin Lens Reflex medium format camera, built by Franke & Heidecke Brunswick between the years 1932 and 1938. This model was the first revision to the original Rolleiflex from 1929 and upgraded the camera with several significant features, including support for 120 format roll…
Ernst Leitz has been making Leica cameras for nearly 100 years and in that time, countless articles have been written about their many products. It’s unlikely that today, in 2019, I could dig up anything that you haven’t already seen before. So, it probably comes as no surprise that this…
