ROLLEIFLEX IDENTIFICATION SERIES

Rolleiflex Models The distinguishing characteristic of the Rolleiflexes - after the first 'Original' model - was the cranked film advance. If you find any errors on this page or have any camera I might be interested in, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.Ĭlick on the small 'thumbnail' pictures below to go to larger ones. For the best sequential display of all the models I know, take a look at the Global Rollei Club site. (Note that this is copyright of APįollow some of the links on my 'Links' page for more information. A copy of the article can beīy kind permission of the editor. Maintain an interest in older film cameras. Which I strongly commend as one of the few general photography publications to

ROLLEIFLEX IDENTIFICATION SERIES

Icons of Photography series of articles in Amateur Photographer. In 2010, Ivor Matanle borrowed a tranche of my Rolleis for one of his Loud-mouthed chap who initiated criticism there didn't have the decency to let me know directly that he had issues.). I have made some corrections and expansions based upon one or two comments on the online Rollei Users Group (unfortunately these took a while to reach me as the rather To compete with that in the myriad websites and specialist publications. There are many passionate Rollei collectors, and the information here does not aim Later TLRs since the 2.8FX have had a strong Japanese/Korean input or sourcing. With the crank-wind 'flex, the knob-wind tradition transferred to the cheaper Rolleicord from 1933 onwards.įrom the mid-70s, Rollei hit growing financial problems, and various owners followed bankruptcy in 1981, culminating in a management buyout from Samsung in 1999. Later 'bells and whistles' like light meters merely refined what was from the outset a winning formula. In the line of development, the crank advance arrived for the Rolleiflexes in 1931, which format broadly saw the line out. However, this story also ignores the simple fact that Rollei must have been well aware of the general layout of successful earlier large-format TLRs - Rollei was to my mind more about brilliant engineering rather than outright invention. This view is borne out by Claus Prochnow's history ( Rollei Report 1), which tells of the factory sawing a Heidoscop in half and experimenting with the viewfinder placement.

One school of thought has it that the Rolleiflex was born due to Heidoscop users developing the habit of taking normal single photos by covering one of the two taking lenses and then the other to take two different exposures beforeĪdvancing the film. The latter lasted until 1941, but in 1929, the Rolleiflex was born, and created the F&H legend. Heidecke joined up with Roland Franke in 1920, the firm producing a range of stereo cameras (Heidoscop for plate/cut film and Rolleidoscop for roll film). The genius of Rollei, however, was to create the first serious medium-format rollfilm TLR - and to get so much of the design right just about first time, so that the model essentially evolved only in the details for the next fifty years. This is a little too convenient a story: Heidecke would certainly have been very familiar with the considerable number of large-format TLRs made in the previous thirty years or so and, as my history page outlines, there had been reflex-type cameras around since the mid-nineteenth century. Franke & Heidecke - Rollei TLRs The idea for the TLR is said in some histories to have occurred to Reinhold Heidecke in the trenches in 1916, as a way to take photos over the parapet without exposing the user's head (his arms, perhaps not unreasonably, being regarded as less important).

Rolleiflex identification