Cameras made in Germany (West or East)
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…
This week, I bring to you the third in a series of articles that were published in the mid to late 1950s about the state of the German Camera Industry. The first two parts were part of a large 42 page special section in the May 1956 issue of Popular…
This is a Zeiss-Ikon Box Tengor 54/2, medium format 6×9 box camera, made by Zeiss-Ikon between the years of 1931 – 1938. This is the third version of the original Box-Tengor, featuring larger viewfinders and an updated design. The Zeiss-Ikon Box-Tengor was a higher quality box camera compared to inexpensive…
This week, I bring to you the second part of a large 42 page special section in the May 1956 issue of Popular Photography where they took a look at the state of the German Camera Industry. You can read the first part here. Like the previous part, this entire…
Last May, I posted a three part series covering articles about the Japanese Photo Industry in the 1950s, and then again in October I re-branded the site for “Red October” where I posted a series of Soviet related articles. Now, it’s Germany’s turn. This will be the first in a…
Prologue Throughout a large portion of the 20th century, the photographic industry was heavily tied to Germany. In addition to cameras and lenses, Germany was also tied to a whole list of atrocities committed by it’s government and the Nazi regime. This is a topic that is very sensitive to…
This is a Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super, a 35mm Single Lens Reflex leaf shutter camera made by Zeiss-Ikon AG in Stuttgart, West Germany between the years 1959 and 1962. It was part of the long lived Contaflex series that saw many variations between the original Contaflex I in 1953 all the…
This is a Penti II originally made by VEB Welta-Kamera-Werk in East Germany between the years 1961 and 1977. Welta would be absorbed into VEB Pentacon in 1964 while this camera was still in production, so many were made after the merger and were then called the Pentacon Penti II. The…
This is a Voigtländer Vitessa L, a 35mm rangefinder camera made by Voigtländer AG Braunschweig between the years of 1954 and 1957. This model was an update to the original Vitessa A from 1950 with the addition of an uncoupled selenium light meter and all new LVS (Light Value System) scale. The…
