Post by PeterW on Mar 21, 2008 12:48:48 GMT -5
Hi Paul,
Don’t have any qualms about disagreeing with me. That’s what this forum is for, to promote lively discussion and debate about older cameras, and thanks for coming back as you did. In any case, I’m not the Oracle, far from it. I try to be as factual as I can, but personal viewpoint has to enter into it.
I didn’t say, nor intend to imply, that Agfa was a marketing failure. To say that when more than a million of the earlier Silettes and a million Optimas were sold would be silly, but I have no intention of getting collecting entangled with international economics and government subsidies, open or hidden.
I still think that with the obvious exception of Leitz the West German camera industry as a whole lost direction in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
My judgement on almost anything (whether or not I collect a particular type of item) has always been that of a collector, and this is where personal viewpoint takes over. I judge on looks, aesthetic styling and actual quality within its price class as well as that hard to describe feel of quality when I first pick it up. I don’t judge the collectable appeal of a camera by the number sold. From the mid to late 1960s Kodak sold something like 70 million Instamatics. They’re an important part of camera history but I don’t feel any desire to collect them.
Maybe – no, there’s no maybe about it, from a company point of view Agfa management made the right decision. They changed rather than lost direction, and the direction they took, as you point out, kept the camera side of the company viable much longer than most German camera makers. I agree they were innovative. The Optima was, I believe, the first fully automatic camera on the market even if, on the first model, you had to use a separate lever to operate the automation.
That ought to make it collectable. To many people it may be, but not to me. I had three of them at various times, and still have one, an Optima II. Compared with the earlier Silettes like the first Super Silette the Optima, to me, looks top heavy even though the outline is ‘clean’. It hasn’t got the same balanced look. The lever on the side of the lens housing to trip the shutter isn’t so nice to use as the top-plate button of the Super Silette which is light and smooth. I find the lever on the Optima fairly smooth but heavy.
I don’t like the shutter staying on its top speed of 1/250 sec with no choice of going slower until light conditions push the aperture open to 2.8. Quite often I and, I’m sure, numerous other amateur photographers, want to use a slower speed and a smaller stop to get depth of field. It’s a glorified snapshot camera for people who aren’t interested much in photography. In that respect maybe it did make other medium priced cameras obsolete, but not for the more experienced photographer.
On one of my Optimas I had to go inside to fix a sticky shutter. Compared with the inside of the earlier Silettes it was cheap and cheerful. Very clever design, well enough assembled, but its strip-metal stampings lacked that feel of quality which earlier Agfas had. I’ve never owned a Selectronic, and after borrowing one for a trial I don’t really want to. I borrowed it to try the much vaunted sensor shutter release. As far as I was concerned it was just a cushioned button. Smooth yes, but not as sensitive as the plain and very smooth button on my older Super Silettes. I was never quite sure when it was going to take the picture.
Later Agfa moved to a composite half-plastic half-metal construction. Nothing wrong with modern plastics as an engineering material. And Agfa had experience of Trolitan plastic for the top plates of early Isolettes . The one they chose to use in the early 1960s didn’t become well liked. It had a reputation with some users who bought them secondhand of aging fast and becoming brittle.
You cite the Silette F, L and LK as examples of new designs. They were, but to me they were a step backwards. Construction was now almost entirely plastic and thin metal stampings, they had four-speed shutters and the cheaper Agnar triplet. The main selling point of the F seemed to be the built-in holder for AGI flash bulbs but it lost the brightline finder. The L got the brightline back and the LK went back to the previous coupled meter. No doubt Agfa saw a market for them but the cameras didn’t show a lot of innovation Nor, in my mind, anything to make them attractive to collectors now.
I like, and collect, earlier Agfa cameras, and full marks to the company for fighting a rearguard action for as long as they did, but to my mind these later models showed very little of the traditional German quality, at least among the leading makers, that once made its cameras famous, and now collectable by collectors who appreciate quality.
One of the reasons why my main collecting interest is in pre-1955 (or thereabouts) German cameras.
PeterW
Don’t have any qualms about disagreeing with me. That’s what this forum is for, to promote lively discussion and debate about older cameras, and thanks for coming back as you did. In any case, I’m not the Oracle, far from it. I try to be as factual as I can, but personal viewpoint has to enter into it.
I didn’t say, nor intend to imply, that Agfa was a marketing failure. To say that when more than a million of the earlier Silettes and a million Optimas were sold would be silly, but I have no intention of getting collecting entangled with international economics and government subsidies, open or hidden.
I still think that with the obvious exception of Leitz the West German camera industry as a whole lost direction in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
My judgement on almost anything (whether or not I collect a particular type of item) has always been that of a collector, and this is where personal viewpoint takes over. I judge on looks, aesthetic styling and actual quality within its price class as well as that hard to describe feel of quality when I first pick it up. I don’t judge the collectable appeal of a camera by the number sold. From the mid to late 1960s Kodak sold something like 70 million Instamatics. They’re an important part of camera history but I don’t feel any desire to collect them.
Maybe – no, there’s no maybe about it, from a company point of view Agfa management made the right decision. They changed rather than lost direction, and the direction they took, as you point out, kept the camera side of the company viable much longer than most German camera makers. I agree they were innovative. The Optima was, I believe, the first fully automatic camera on the market even if, on the first model, you had to use a separate lever to operate the automation.
That ought to make it collectable. To many people it may be, but not to me. I had three of them at various times, and still have one, an Optima II. Compared with the earlier Silettes like the first Super Silette the Optima, to me, looks top heavy even though the outline is ‘clean’. It hasn’t got the same balanced look. The lever on the side of the lens housing to trip the shutter isn’t so nice to use as the top-plate button of the Super Silette which is light and smooth. I find the lever on the Optima fairly smooth but heavy.
I don’t like the shutter staying on its top speed of 1/250 sec with no choice of going slower until light conditions push the aperture open to 2.8. Quite often I and, I’m sure, numerous other amateur photographers, want to use a slower speed and a smaller stop to get depth of field. It’s a glorified snapshot camera for people who aren’t interested much in photography. In that respect maybe it did make other medium priced cameras obsolete, but not for the more experienced photographer.
On one of my Optimas I had to go inside to fix a sticky shutter. Compared with the inside of the earlier Silettes it was cheap and cheerful. Very clever design, well enough assembled, but its strip-metal stampings lacked that feel of quality which earlier Agfas had. I’ve never owned a Selectronic, and after borrowing one for a trial I don’t really want to. I borrowed it to try the much vaunted sensor shutter release. As far as I was concerned it was just a cushioned button. Smooth yes, but not as sensitive as the plain and very smooth button on my older Super Silettes. I was never quite sure when it was going to take the picture.
Later Agfa moved to a composite half-plastic half-metal construction. Nothing wrong with modern plastics as an engineering material. And Agfa had experience of Trolitan plastic for the top plates of early Isolettes . The one they chose to use in the early 1960s didn’t become well liked. It had a reputation with some users who bought them secondhand of aging fast and becoming brittle.
You cite the Silette F, L and LK as examples of new designs. They were, but to me they were a step backwards. Construction was now almost entirely plastic and thin metal stampings, they had four-speed shutters and the cheaper Agnar triplet. The main selling point of the F seemed to be the built-in holder for AGI flash bulbs but it lost the brightline finder. The L got the brightline back and the LK went back to the previous coupled meter. No doubt Agfa saw a market for them but the cameras didn’t show a lot of innovation Nor, in my mind, anything to make them attractive to collectors now.
I like, and collect, earlier Agfa cameras, and full marks to the company for fighting a rearguard action for as long as they did, but to my mind these later models showed very little of the traditional German quality, at least among the leading makers, that once made its cameras famous, and now collectable by collectors who appreciate quality.
One of the reasons why my main collecting interest is in pre-1955 (or thereabouts) German cameras.
PeterW