Film Fridays: The Space Age-looking East German autofocus SLR that nearly was

Wow what a beast !!! I worked in a West German office equipment company long time ago, about the same time I got my Praktica SLR, I would say, German mechanics are massive and heavy duty but the electronics, well, worked but not comparable to Japanese made. If you break open a Metz hand flash you will see how it compares to a Japanese one, say Panasonic, but in actual test the GN is higher than stated. In short, German made ones are massive but messy inside, the failure rate was high back then.

My first SLR in 1958 was a Praktina made in Dresden with a 58mm f2 Carl Zeiss Biotar. Built like a tank. No need to carry a baseball bat I would have knock out anyone with it who would have dared to bully me. It had a removable viewfinder to enable me to take waist level photos. I still have Kodakchrome slides today of comparable quality as any photos I have taken today. If it had a DSLR today I would not hesitate to get it.

Dam that thing be ugly. Looks like an old faux leather shaving kit from the 70’s

No need to dig out nonexistent phantom cameras, in that era 1991 Minolta 7xi was and still is a popular camere with unorthodox interface, spaceship like body design, cards and powerzoom and motorized manual focus xi lenses.

This is wow - very, very informative and interesting, thanks! NEVER heard any gossips about it back then.

I had one nearly the same, the. Very futuristic Konica Ayborg I think it was called and a Samsung designed by Porsche. Both 35mm superzoom’s and I still have them in the loft keeping them purely because of their futuristic design and innovation

A shame Kickstarter wasn't around. With that textured finish and the red dot, there's a lot to like here. And remember, Olympus & Leitz declined not to (or couldn't afford to) swtich to auto focusing film cameras, so there was some forward thinking going on in Dresden.

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A cold-war-era stealth bomber, Soviet-style!!!

I had a Praktica camera around 1977 - my first real camera and I loved it. It was the first cheap SLR (meaning the first I could afford) with through the lens metering. I took lots of shots with that, and a Vivitar flash unit, until I had a job that let me buy my dream camera - an Oly OM-2. My OM-2 also lacked autofocus, but it wasn't something I missed (Olympus never did get good, reliable autofocus on their removable lens film SLRs).

My first 35mm camera when I was 14 was a Praktica LTL3, and I loved it! A few years later, it became my infrared camera of choice because of its easy film loading -- a brilliant reverse spring catch that trapped the leader.

A beautiful camera. Such a shame that a lot of DDR factories were closed down. It seems logic because this factories lost their financially support of the DDR government. Some companies were lucky to go on with BRD companies but the most didn't.

Not usually a fan of futurist design but this is great. Looks made of roofing asphalt. Both the shape and texture. Way better than any canon t90s etc, different league.

Carl Zeiss of GDR Jena and FRG Oberkochen had better luck. After 1990 re-unification the company was reorganised. Most of Jena was closed down with huge job losses but the East German spy satellite division survived as world leader. Zeiss and Leica names used by Sony and Panasonic cameras; pulling power? Made in Germany adds value.

In the 1980s, Praktika cameras and lenses were sold by a low to medium cost retail chain in West Germany, called "Quelle". They went bankrupt in the early 2000s. Praktica was certainly the best camera gear available in East Germany and neighbouring communist countries. However, due its simple technology and relatively low quality Praktica never became popular in West Germany or western Europe - unless you favoured low cost over everything else.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, former East Germany (GDR) became notoriously short of foreign currency, especially the western Deutsche Mark (DM) currency. In fact, the GDR was close to state bankruptcy for most of the 1980s. Exporting inexpensive products like Praktica to the west was a means to get the desperately needed western Deutsche Mark. However, it also meant that supply of Praktica cameras in East Germany was limited and cost was high by local standards.

1. Hard not to laugh
2. AF would have failed
3. Whoever would have imported this model, would have a list
of things they would need to fix, before they could sell it.
4. It would spy on Western countries 😉

The comments in DPreview teach me a lot more than the actual articles. All the time.
It is amazing how many experts we have. Please accept my appreciation. 🙏📸

Regarding design of this mock up, I thought Luigi Colani more than anything else. He introduced the Canon T90 which was back then truly a statement in design.

I remember my Praktica PLC2 with affection and still use the lenses on my Pentax. I moved to Pentax because I thought (knew?) that Praktica was doomed;(

I think that this looks, er, cool.

It is a bit bulging , but when I first looked at the image I thought it looked closer to an EOS1 than any old DSLR design before losing the film winder.

What those German chemists could do with a lump of coal!

Looks like the inspiration for the BlackMagic pocket cam

What an ugly looking monster...is this a hoax ?

A Trabbi with a lens...

interesting story. thank you for sharing!

The superb Werra (Carl Zeiss Jena - DDR) cameras from the '50s & '60s :

http://www.cjs-classic-cameras.co.uk/zeiss/werra.html#werramatic

Beautiful and usable even now days.

Ok, if today had been 1st of April, I would have had my doubts about this.

Wow! I like the looks of that camera! Says, the guy with an Pro-3 ;)

I find myself looking for these posts/links on Friday now. Good content. Please keep it up. So many cameras I wasn't familiar with at the time. Even so I probably wouldn't have been that interested since, at the time, I had the view that cameras were simply utilitarian tools.

Pre-internet you just didn't know what you didn't know; unless somebody you knew, knew it and pointed you toward it.

My first serious camera was a Practiflex purchased when I was 15 years old in 1952.

Still, this Praktica has better ergonomics than a Sony Mirrorless.

I still have a couple of Praktica's...got it for washing some ones car when I was 9 or 10 :-)

In 1960 I foolishly bought a new Pentacon F with the f3.5 Primotar lens. This lens was so bad that when I could finally afford to buy a Takumar lens and took comparitive photos of an iron railing, you could see the difference just looking at the negatives by eye. It had a real leather and plastic case that drew attention for all the wrong reasons. Apart from the lens, it worked, but the shutter started jammimg within about 10 years - something on the rubberised fabric was exuding and glueing it up. I didn't bother trying to get it fixed.

Practika might have been ubiquitous among Soviet photography enthusiasts and budget-conscious western hobbyists, but it was leaps and bounds ahead of most Soviet cameras available in Eastern Block markets, not to mention it was about three times the price and 10 times more difficult to find.

My BX20 was perfect with its matching 28, 50 and 135mm Pentacons, exposed perfectly every time, and was fully TTL compatible with all Olympus flash accessories (which, in the eighties, were a whole ecosystem).

Practika was to Soviet cameras what MZ and Simson were to Soviet motorcycles and mopeds - not terrific by Western standards, but leaps and bounds ahead of their Soviet counterparts, with the whole local cult following to match it (as for these bikes once you had the money saved, you actually had to find one to buy, as opposed to the Soviet ones sitting on the shelf costing 40% less waiting for some poor enthusiast to bite the bait of eternal pushing).

A little satirical bit of my brain insists that Leica stole the R8/R9 design language from this.

That is seriously ugly...

My father had a Praktica LTL. Felt only slightly less agricultural than my Zenit-E. Eternal thanks for progression leading into cameras like the FM and particularly the FM2n.

"But as the 1980's rolled around", a practical auto-focus SLR was still five years away. The Minolta Maxxum 7000 / Alpha 7000 was the first, introduced in 1985. The first Canon EF-mount cameras came in 1987. So it's not like 1989 was very late to bring out an AF SLR.

Now whether an East German company, or any German company, could have sold an AF SLR with performance, features, and price to compete with the mass-market Minolta, Canon, Nikon, and Pentax AF SLRs is another question.

The poor thing looks quite bloated

This reminds me, back in the film days I mainly used Nikon and an old Rolleiflex. But in addition I had always a Praktica BX20 with its 50mm in the boot of my car, loaded with FP4 or HP5, in case I saw something interesting. I found it really quite a charming and capable camera, delivering good results.

Does it make heavy breathing sounds?

the red button is for self destruct countdown