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Dr August Nagel began
his camera design business in 1908 as Drexler and Nagel, quickly to become
the Contessa Kamera-werke a year later. In 1919, he bought the Nettle
Kamera-werke and renamed the combined operation Contessa-Nettle AG. Post-WW
I Germany was a difficult economic environment for entrepreneurs and many
small manufacturers failed. While Dr Nagel's designs were technically
successful, he found it financially necessary to join other small companies
that formed Zeiss Ikon. That liaison was short-lived, however, and in
1928 he again formed his own firm, Dr Nagel-Werke, specializing in folding
plate cameras. In 1932, Eastman Kodak bought this business and established
it in Stuttgart as Kodak AG, with Dr Nagel as its managing director and
design head.
Dr Nagel had
been an early adopter of downsizing to exploit the emerging finer grained
emulsions. He had produced the Recomar quarter plate
cameras while these were still favored by advanced European amateurs,
but he was quick to recognize the advantages of designing cameras around
the new roll films. The Pupille, using 127 roll film
and available with a fast f /2.0 Schneider Xenon lens in
a helical lens mount, could be seen as a capable alternative to the Ermanox.
It also mounted slower Xenars, Elmars and Tessars. Kodak AG also made
at the same time a bellows design for 127 film usually described as the
Kodak Vollenda No. 48 with slower Schneider or Zeiss
lenses and a more modest No. 52 with only a metal frame
eye-level finder and a similar lens selection. The slower lenses were
front-cell focusing, while the others had helical mounts.
Kodak wanted
to compete on equal terms with the German manufactures of precision cameras,
and it recognized the emergence of miniature photography as a new front.
It had an image problem, however. Kodaks were seen as family cameras and
the assault was being led by the manufacturers of German precision equipment.
Leicas and Contaxes were well beyond Kodak's traditional pricing, however,
and the opportunity to undercut the pricing of the competition fit well
into the Kodak marketing strategy of making photography accessible to
mass markets. It charged Dr Nagel with the task of creating a 35mm camera
that would challenge the 35mm models that other German companies were
offering, but at a significantly lower price. The 1934 Retina,
a bellows folder with reliable cross-strut supports was his answer and
it succeeded handily in its market niche, aided significantly by a new
film cassette design by Kodak that, through the use of disposable cassettes,
greatly simplified film loading. The original Retina had a rigid, direct
view finder. A second Retina was added with a rangefinder and designs
in this basic form persisted well into the 1960s.
The Nagel-Werke
factory adopted folder designs from Rochester, some of which differed
little from their American counterparts. The international Kodak organization,
realized however the cachet that precision German designs could offer
to advanced amateur photographers and responded with a series of rollfilm
designs built in Stuttgart and variously marketed on the Continent, in
England and the U.S. The Duo
half-frame 16 on 620 horizontal designs were offered with and without
a rangefinder. The model with the folding finder is only slightly larger
and heavier than the contemporary Retina, yet makes an image with over
twice the area. This model was available in both Europe and the U. S.
with Kodak Anastigmats and in Europe only with Xenars or Tessars, with
the slowest models using front-cell focusing. Although McKeown lists production
from 1935-37, these were advertised by Kodak at least as late as May 1938.
The Suprema was a 12 on 620 horizontal folder with a
rigid viewfinder of similar design to the Duo.
The elegant
Regent
was not
only unique to Stuttgart, but was unique within Stuttgart. While most
Nagel models had bodies with angled ends, unlike immediate pre-war Rochester
folder models that had migrated to rounded ends, the Regent was streamlined
and, turtle-like, retracted all of its appendages into its smooth shell
when not active. The very compact Deco design included an ingenuous, but
separate coupled rangefinder smoothly tucked into its rounded contours
and an equally ingenious and practical popup viewfinder.The Regent
II, which returned to the angular body profile, had a coupled,
superimposed rangefinder combined with the viewfinder. These top-end Stuttgart
folders were offered with f/4.5 and f/3.5 Schneider Xenars or an f/4.5
Zeiss Tessar; the Schneiders were uncoated while the Tessar may have been
hardcoated, since Zeiss began coating in 1937. The Nagel models competed
in price and quality with offerings from Zeiss, Voigtländer, Agfa,
and Ensign in England. Both cameras were produced from 1935-39. Both models
made 6x9 images and could be adjusted to make 6x9 half frames (6x4.5).
Kodak AG continued
the Retina series after WW II, improving on its rangefinder 35mm designs
by redesigned finders, exchangeable lens elements altering focal length
and exposure meters. When SLRs emerged as the market choice in the mid-1960s,
Retinas followed suit, but German production could not match the value
created by Japanese camera technology, and Stuttgart offerings fell victim
to the same economic and technological forces that had doomed Kodak's
American production. In an anomalous marketing move, the English division
in 1958 introduced the Kodak 66, a modernized, plasticized
Suprema with a front-cell focusing f/6.3 or f/4.5 Anaston--perhaps
the last folder that Kodak offered.
There are links
to Retina pages on the Kodak links page
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&
A standards official was
heard to sardonically remark that the beauty of standards are that there
are so many to choose from. |
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