Cameras made in the United States
This is a Kodak VR35 K14, a 35mm point and shoot camera manufactured in Japan by Chinon Industries for the Eastman Kodak company between the years 1986 – 1989. It was the top of the line in Kodak’s VR35 family which consisted of at least 15 different models ranging from…
This is an ANSCO Automatic Reflex 3.5 twin lens reflex camera, made by ANSCO of Binghamton, NY starting in 1947. It shot 6cm x 6cm images on 120 format roll film and had a feature set that compared favorably to top tier TLRs from Germany. The ANSCO Reflex was an…
This is a Signet 40 rangefinder camera made by the Eastman Kodak Company between the years 1956 and 1959. It was the successor to the earlier Signet 35 retaining it’s excellent triangular coincident image rangefinder, and improving upon it with a redesigned Bakelite and stamped metal body, a more flexible…
This is a Kodak Bantam Special, made by the Eastman Kodak Corporation in Rochester, NY between the years 1936 and 1948. The camera was the top of the line in Kodak’s Bantam series which used 828 roll film and made 28mm x 40mm exposures which were 30% larger than standard…
This is a Perfex Forty-Four 35mm rangefinder camera made by the Candid Camera Corporation in Chicago in 1939. The Forty-Four was the first in a series made by the Candid company until the early 1950s at which point the company out of business. Featuring an interchangeable screw mount with a…
This is a Kodak Chevron, a medium format rangefinder camera buit by the Eastman Kodak Company between the years of 1953 and 1956. The Chevron, like all medium format Kodak cameras from the era, used Kodak’s proprietary 620 format of film, which was nearly identical to competing 120 film, but…
This is an Anscomark M 35mm rangefinder camera made in 1960 by Riken Optical Co., Ltd. (Ricoh) for GAF USA who at the time distributed cameras in the United States under the ANSCO brand. The camera was developed by Riken for GAF in exchange for some of it’s photocopier technologies. The…
The Argus C3 is one of those cameras that for American collectors is one you could accidentally collect. I cannot tell you how many Argus C3s (and their variants like the Matchmatic) I’ve picked up in job lots of cameras where I wanted something else. I’ve seen them at antique…
What is it? This is a Kodak Motormatic 35 camera. It is an updated version of Kodak’s first 35mm auto exposure camera, the Kodak Automatic 35 which was released the year before. The Motormatic added a spring motor advance, allowing a photographer to make exposures as fast as he or…
This is an Argus C33, a 35mm rangefinder produced by the Argus Corporation in Ann Arbor, Michigan between the years 1959 and 1961. The C33 was an oddly designed, but ambitious update to the original C3 which added many features that had become standard for rangefinders in the years after…
If your experience with photography is limited to hand held 35mm or roll film cameras made within the last 100 years, you likely have never heard of the Packard shutter. The history of the Packard shutter and how it came to be is shrouded in mystery. There is very little…
What is it? This is a Baby Brownie Special made by the Eastman Kodak Corporation between the years of 1939 and 1952. This model was an upgrade from the simpler Baby Brownie by adding a fixed telescopic viewfinder an integrated shutter release button, and a cloth carrying handle. Later models…
