Any 6x6 folders wider than 75mm?

Were there any 6x6 folders made with lenses wider than 75mm? I see 75,

80 and 85mm but never anything wider. Is that because none were ever

made or are they just very rare?

I can't think of any off hand. 6x6 folders were usually designed as pocket cameras for amateurs, though some of them are very good and have nice lenses, so I suspect they were mostly fitted with normal lenses, as most such cameras were pre-APS.

Not specifically 6x6, but in medium format, fixed lens folders or

rigid compacts of a similar ilk these are what come to mind:

<br><br>

6x7: Plaubel Makina 67W<br>

6x4.5: Fuji GS645W , GA645, GA645W

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6x9: Fuji 690W<br>

<br>

There was a thread to this effect on

rec.photo.equipment.medium-format a few weeks ago and other

folders and medium format compacts were listed. <br><br>

 

Godfrey

Along the lines of the cameras Godfrey lists would also be the Brooks Veriwide (6x9cm, 100mm lens).

Surprisingly no, whn you consider how many 6X6 folders were available over the years. Even Fuji put a 75mm on their folder when they had 60mm lenses on their other compact 120 roll film rangefinders. Seems like a 6X6 folder with a 55mm lens or so would have been very desireable and just as easy to make as one with a 75 or 80, and guesing the focus wouldn't have been as hard. I wonder if there isn't some inherent engineering problem to overcome putting a wide lens on a compact folder--vignetting perhaps?

I can't see any reason why you couldn't put a 55mm lens on one. Since it wouldn't need to be a retrofocus design lens, you have plenty of space between the lens and film plane. It would need a short bellows and a short mechanical extension, but you'd think that would lead to greater stability. Since 55mm isn't very wide (approximates as 35mm in 35mm format) in principle vignetting shouldn't be a problem covering a 6x6 format. I don't know how a tripet would perform at shorter focal lengths though. Ditto for the 4-el tessar designs.

 

Maybe going to a more complex lens would have increased the cost of the lens too much, or maybe they just never thought it would sell.

There is the 6x7cm Plaubel Makina which came with a 65mm

Nikkor lens. A very fine camera and lens!

i think a really good quality lens in the 55mm range might have been pretty exotic stuff in the heyday of 6x6 folders. it might also have been so bulky that the camera wouldn't fold: the best 35mm wide angle (on a 35mm camera) of the 30s and 40s was the zeiss biogon, which almost touched the film at infinity focus.

 

there were tessars in the 35-40mm range, but they tended to be either pretty slow, or not super sharp (or both). i think it would be easier to do today with modern glasses and computer design...

 

rick :)=

As mentioned, most 6x6 roll film folders were targeted at snapshooters. Further consider that most snapshots, at least in the days when these cameras were most popular, were either informal portraits from a 6 to 12 foot conversational distance, or else scenery pictures made at infinity. Then factor in that before the second world war many, if not most snapshot roll films weren't enlarged, but simply contact printed. Now imagine a folding 6x6 camera which probably cost more due to having a 55mm lens, and produced contact prints in which Unlce Joe's face looked only 73% as large in the finished print compared to a "normal" 75mm lens. The camera makers likely thought most folks which this class of camera was targeted towards would probably have found it pretty disappointing.

I don't know Todd, the Brownie Kodak cameras from that period all had wide angle lenses on them (lousy ones at that), and they were aimed at the snap shot crowd more than the Ikontas and Various Voigtlanders, etc, which were more for people who understood something about photography.

You may be right Andrew. But looking at my small assortment of Brownie-type box cameras from the 30s & 40s, I'd estimate the focal length of all the 6x9 cm ones to be between 100 and 115mm (roughly equivalent to 75 to 85mm on a 6x6) and the one on my 50s vintage 6x6 Brownie Hawkeye to be very near 75mm. Even the lens on my 1920s vintage Vest Pocket Model B, which is a very basic snapshot camera, despite being a 6x4.5 folder, is also very nearly 75mm.

 

Camera makers in the 30s - 50s were first and foremost, businesses. And they, like businesses today, existed to make profits from selling products. The fact that very few if any made a 6x6 folder with a wide angle lens can be attributed to one of three reasons: nobody thought of it; there was some technical reason it wasn't practical; or they thought it wasn't what the majority of their customers wanted and it wouldn't sell, or at least wouldn't sell in large enough numbers to be viable. The first reason seems pretty unlikely since wide field lenses were being used on large format view cameras at least by the 30s. Most camera makers have always been pretty innovative. Surely someone in the design department would have had the thought, "Hey, let's put a wide lens on a roll film, folder!" The second reason may have some merit. I remember reading a comment somewhere, perhaps by Ansel Adams, about a particular lens being the shortest focal length that would cover the negative area (of a large format camera). So there may have been some practical limitation in lens designs of the period that prevented a wide lens from being used. But given the economic conditions of the period, the incentive to efficiently produce a single design that would "hit" the widest possible customer base (at least as the camera makers perceived it to be) seems pretty resonable to me.

Early Ikonta A's and Super Ikonta A's came with 70mm F3.5 Tessars. These are 6 x 4.5 format, but for those who typically crop to a rectangular image from a 6 x 6, this should not matter.

I would also like a wide angle folder. Being a lens designer I set out to see if I could design a short retrofocus four element lens that would fit inside a Perkeo 6x6 when folded. No problem, and it's sharp! I'm thinking about having a few made. Any interest out there? I now just stitch two or more shots together with Panorama Factory for my wide shots. I've also got pretty good results with a wide angle attachment made for Nikon digital cameras.