Before Japanese cameras took over, this brilliant German design ruled the world

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

Way back in 1912, a Dutchman living in the German city of Dresden, Johan Steenbergen, started Industrie und Handelsgesellschaft (the Industrial and Trading company) that made cameras under the Ihagee brand name.

Ihagee is the pronunciation of the abbreviation of the company's name, IHG in German, so pronounced "eehagáy".

The company was quite successful and spent more than 20 years building a variety of folding, plate and reflex cameras. But it didn't become widely known outside Europe until 1936, when it brought the world its first 35mm mirror reflex camera: the Kine Exakta.

Before that, Ihagee produced a variety of folding, box and, most importantly, reflex cameras. The most important of these was the Roll-Paff Reflex, which was introduced in 1932. It was a relatively simple 6x6 SLR using 120 roll film and is often regarded as an important step in the development of the Exakta concept.

The next year, Ihagee introduced the first truly compact SLR – the Vest Pocket Exakta – which made 8 exposures, each 4x6.5 cm on a roll of 'vest pocket' 120 film. It featured a waist-level finder and a focal plane shutter with speeds to 1/1000, which enabled the use of interchangeable lenses.

The Vest Pocket (VP) Exakta was designed by Karl Nüchterlein (1904-1945), the brilliant, 29-year-old chief designer at Ihagee. He developed the camera around 1930-1933 and it was introduced at the Leipzig Spring Fair in 1933.

Then came the camera that put Nüchterlein and Ihagee on the world stage, the Kine Exakta, in 1936. It was the world's first 35mm SLR and was derived directly from the VP Exakta.

It was called the "Kine" Exakta because that's the German word for the 35mm cine film it used. It had a folding waist-level finder, an unusual left-handed, front-mounted shutter release and a rapid film-wind thumb lever.

It had a focal plane shutter with speeds from 1/2 to 1/1000 sec and sported an array of high-quality interchangeable lenses. Fewer than 30,000 Kine Exaktas were made before the Second World War stopped production in 1940.

As the war approached, the political climate in Germany became difficult for Steenbergen – a Dutch national with a Jewish-American wife. After being detained for a period by the Nazis, they fled Germany through Switzerland in 1941.

In 1943, even though the Ihagee factory was by then part of the war effort, Nüchterlein patented a TTL (through-the-lens) metering version of the Kine Exakta. That camera was never built, as he was drafted into the German Army during the war and was later declared "missing in action".

During the devastating Allied air raids on Dresden on the night of February 13-14 1945, the Ihagee factory was hit and the destruction was total.

After the war, Dresden fell into the Soviet occupation zone. The Soviet authorities were eager to restart industrial production, though they neglected to develop Nüchterlein's TTL patent. Had they done so, Exakta might still be a leading brand today.

The first postwar cameras were essentially continuations of the prewar Kine Exakta design. Many collectors can identify these early postwar cameras by subtle changes caused by wartime shortages and reconstruction. Some cameras exported abroad even carried markings such as "Soviet Occupied Germany."

Production of improved models soon started and, until the arrival of the Japanese SLRs in the mid-to-late 1950s, Exakta dominated the 35 SLR field, with a market share of more than 95%!

In 1949 the Exakta II was introduced, an improved version of the original, which was followed by the Exakta Varex in 1950. The Varex was arguably the most influential Exakta model, as it was the first with a removable / interchangeable viewfinder system, offering a choice of an eye-level pentaprism or a waist-level finder.

This series quickly became one of the world's leading professional and scientific camera systems, with an enormous range of accessories and lenses.

In the early 1950s, Ihagee realized that it needed a more competitive, lower-priced camera to bring people to the Exakta brand – so it created the cheaper Exa series.

The original Exa model (1950-1959) used a guillotine shutter with a metal blade that dropped as the mirror rose, then "popped" back up. It was simple to make, reliable and compact enough to fit in the low-cost camera's smaller body, but suffered from slightly uneven exposure, increased vibration and a top speed of just 1/150 sec.

It also featured an unusual "stick shift" or "four-on-the-floor" shutter speed selector, for a focal-plane shutter with speeds of 1/25, 1/50, 1/100 and 1/150 sec. as well as 'B'. The Exa's bayonet accepted all Exakta lenses and it featured the interchangeable finders of the Exakta.

It was for these reasons that the Exa II was released in 1960, with a more conventional focal-plane shutter and a shutter speed selector mounted concentric with the film rewind knob. Shutter speeds now went to 1/250 sec.

Ironically, the factory survived the bombing better than it survived the Cold War economy. By 1970, Ihagee had effectively been absorbed into Pentacon and Exakta production ended around 1971. While the Exakta RTL 1000 was produced from 1969 through 1973, many regard it as essentially a little modified, rebadged Praktica.

The cheaper Exa series continued until 1990, through various somewhat improved models. Exact production numbers are unknown, as many records were lost when the factory was destroyed, but best estimates suggest that over one million of each had been made.

Read more of David Young's ongoing series on classic cameras , as well as his book A Brief History of Photography .

You might also like…

Take a look at the best point-and-shoot cameras you can buy today.