One of the greatest benefits of the content on this site is the preservation of information regarding photography and old cameras. From my camera reviews to the 100+ Keppler’s Vault articles and Zeiss Historica newsletters to the interviews in my One Hour Photo series, the Rotoloni Report, and the many guests on the Camerosity Podcast, it is important to me to document the first hand knowledge of experts for future generations. My hope is that by having a single location for people to read about a great deal of old information, that future generations will benefit from it.
During my research, I have come across a great many websites created by other people who put a lot of time and effort into documenting something, but unfortunately, not all websites last forever. Some previously great sites have sine gone offline and are no longer available for public consumption. For dead websites, the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org is a wonderful resource, but it can be very slow, difficult to navigate, and often, content like JPGs and other media is missing.
When possible, I like to archive old sites and re-host them in their original form, not only for those of you who might find them beneficial, but also for me, as I sometimes refer to them for future camera articles. In the past, I’ve previously hosted mirrors for Mike Connealy’s original camera review website, Aidas Pikiotas Sovietcams.com, mirandacamera.com, and Andrzej Wrotniak’s website, wrotniak.net.
The first of two new additions to the website archive was the Zeiss Camera repair site operated by Henry Scherer. Henry was one of the world’s most respected repair technicians, specializing in Zeiss-Ikon Contax, Contaflex, and Contarex cameras. His repair abilities were second to none, but so was his waiting list.
In addition to offering repair services, his website was full of well researched and informative articles, repair info, and other Zeiss related information. Unfortunately, Henry passed away in early 2025 and shortly after, his website disappeared. While this site no longer offers any repair information, the articles and research he put into this site is back up and available once again.
https://mikeeckman.com/zeisscamera/
The second site is one which I have used nearly every time I have ever needed to research East German cameras, Michael Sorms’s dresdner-kameras.de. Michael’s website was one of the oldest websites on the Internet for camera information, but stopped receiving regular updates in the early 2020s and eventually went offline sometime after April 2023.
Of all the sites I’ve had to archive, this one needed to most work as a huge amount of the pages had navigation errors, broken links, missing images, and other CSS and HTML problems. I was able to repair most of it and the site is whole once again and ready for your perusal. For anyone who has never seen this site before, keep in mind that it is entirely in German, so you’ll need to use some type of browser translation service if you do not read German.
https://mikeeckman.com/dresdner/
As always, I host these pages in their most recently published forms using what is available in the Wayback Machine. The only changes made are a short blurb on the main page reminding everyone that these are archives, and the occasional coding changes to make the site continue to function using modern browsers.
I hope you find these resources as useful as they have been for me, and for as long as mikeeckman.com is up, they’ll be available to you as well.
That’s really great and very useful! I had used Dresdner Kameras in the past a few times, but didn’t even realized yet they were gone.
Unfortunately, I have seen this a few times more, e.g. artaphot.ch with its great resources in German and English about Minolta lenses (tests and collected knowledge from the German Minolta forum mi-fo.de) went offline 1.5 years ago, and http://praktina.com/ shows now an under construction sign only. The later worked a few weeks ago, but tried to contact the author in the last two years and never got an answer, so let’s see if it actually comes back…
So yes, this restauration work is definitely helpful!
Fellow readers of this blog: In addition to Mike’s excellent regular articles, his efforts and out-of-pocket expenses in archiving and refreshing these old web resources are worth our financial support. The “Wayback Machine” is not truly forever and has been hacked with DNS attacks already more than once. Y’all hit that PayPal button now, alright?!
https://www.678vintagecameras.ca/ is still down, and it was a fine ressource for everything Contax/Yashica… Maybe someone in your network can work out how to contact the author/owner to save it?
Great work! You could have saved yourself a lot of work, the author of Dresdner Kameras had mirrored the page with Club Daguerre: https://club-daguerre.eu/dresdner-kameras/
Thank you, Walter. Brave browser (and likely most other browsers) offers one-click language translation, page by page. So English speakers can use “club daguerre” web pages easily.
I don’t mind the work because in my opinion, two archives are better than one. The more accessible we can make this information, the easier it will be for people to find it.