Zeiss Ikon Taxona

<p>Here is a strange little camera. It is a Zeiss Ikon Taxona, a 35mm square format 24mm x 24mm camera with a 37.5mm f3.5 Zeiss Jena Tessar lens. I found this little guy in an antique shop in Moritzburg Germany.</p>

<p><img src="http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/427079_4337873410001_741322408_n.jpg" alt="" width="650" height="497" /></p>

<p>While this camera is tiny it is solid metal and is surprisingly heavy. The camera has some nice features for it's time with slow shutter speeds and a combined film advance and shutter cocking mechanism. The one major drawback is that it is zone focus, but with a 37.5 mm lens this is not a deal breaker.</p>

<p>The camera does win the "Strangest Focal Length" award for the 37.5mm lens. 37.5mm translates to about 48mm for 24x35mm. Also, it is odd for a camera with slow shutter speeds to be missing a cable release.</p>

<p>I took the camera out shooting with an Olympus RC as a light meter and to get the range for focusing on close up objects. A zone focus camera like this benefits from fast film, so I loaded it with Tmax 400. The shutter proved to be very accurate and all photos were well exposed. The lens was another story, as shown in the next set of photos. The camera can take Lomo-style soft-focus shots, but even knowing the range and stopping the lens down getting sharp photos is extremely challenging. Out of dozens of photos I had about three in focus. The first photo is a typical image while the next two are the best I could get.</p>

<p>Shot 1<br>

<img src="http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/625408_4337873530004_613684527_n.jpg" alt="" width="650" height="623" /></p>

<p>Shot 2<br>

<img src="http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/557185_4337873690008_1428962131_n.jpg" alt="" width="650" height="624" /></p>

<p>Shot 3<br>

<img src="http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/530176_4337873930014_1826294609_n.jpg" alt="" width="650" height="622" /></p>

<p>Nice find , <strong>Stephen</strong>; these are quite hard to come by. They started out with a "Tenax" name tag, as I recall, but were renamed "Taxona" in the East-West trademark wars of the 1950's. I have a bigger brother, the Pentona, a similar full-frame zone focus camera. There's something a little odd about the images you've posted, in that they should be sharper than that, and it seems to me they are consistently sharper on the left of the image than on the right, or is that just my eyes playing tricks? If so, it could be an issue involving flatness of film within the camera, or an element de-centered within the lens. It's hard to get anything grossly OOF with a 37.5mm lens and 400ISO film!</p>

<p>Great little camera, and thanks for posting</p>

<p>There is something wrong with it, but the Taxona makes a cute decoration. It won't replace the RC as a my little shooter, but that is challenging to do in any case. </p>

<p>I didn't know about this until I came to your post so thank you for taking the time to share. This feels like a very quirky camera and I wonder who it would have been aimed at.</p>

<p>It was a "popular" model - more economical of film than a 24x36 image in a place and time when film costs were a factor to be considered. It filled the same sort of niche that a point and shoot does today. It was part of the effort by the East to field a full range of models at different price points. Actually, that was somewhat easier to do in the East, because so much of the machinery was still there (if it wasn't bombed flat or taken to the USSR, that is).</p>

<p>Thanks for the post, Stephen.</p>

Another version with

different lens: Novonar Anastigmat 35mm/3.5

 

Shutter B,1,2,5,10,25,50,100,300

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