BLAST FROM THE PAST
John Wade reviews a classic Zeiss Ikon folding camera
LAUNCHED 1934
PRICE AT LAUNCH £23 10s (£23.50)
GUIDE PRICE NOW £150 (recent auction sale)
In 1926, a year after Leica introduced the first truly viable way of using 35mm cine film in a still camera, Zeiss Ikon was formed by the amalgamation of four other photographic companies: Ernemann, Contessa-Nettel, Ica and Goerz. The newcomers soon started to make a camera to rival the Leica. The result, in 1932, was the Contax. It was a great camera, though a little bulky. Those who wanted something more pocketable had to wait two years, but it was worth the wait. The Super Nettel turned out to be a folding camera without the interchangeable lens facility of the Contax, but with a whole lot of its other top attributes.
Folded, the Super Nettel measures 13x7.5x3cm. Then, pressing a stud on the top plate drops down a bed as the lens panel self-erects into its shooting position. The model reviewed here sports a 5cm f/3.5 Triotar lens, but the camera can also be found with 5cm f/3.5 and f/2.8 Tessars. From the Contax it borrows a vertically running metal focal plane shutter, speeded 1/5-1/1,000sec; from Zeiss Ikon’s prestigious range of Super Ikonta cameras it takes a special kind of rangefinder that uses two rotating prisms in place of the more common twin-mirror system; from the Contax II comes a shutter release in the cent
