My fathers Arette IA 1956-1963

[lahnet]

Yesterday after my father had cleaned his basement, he gave me a camera he bought from new looooong time ago.

It is a German made Arette IA produced from 1956 to1963 by Apparate und Kamerabau Gmbh. It has no rangefinder, no lightmeter and there is not many parts that moves inside.

Guess I will have to load a film soon and give it a try.

If there is any of you that knows this cam and maybe have samples please tell.



Link to big pic, 2400 x 1600
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lahnet/3401680030/sizes/o/

[Orio]

It looks a lot like my Agfa Silette.

[scsambrook]

I remember the Arette range from the late 1950s and early 1960s - there were a variety of models, some with coupled rangefinders and/or built in exposure meters, and also different lenses.

This one looks like the "basis model" with a three-element lens and a 4-speed shutter. Going up the range, there were 8 or 9 speed Gauthier Prontor-SV and -SVS shutters speeded from 1 sec to 1/300th, with delayed action and full X and M flash synchro - that let you do synchro-sun ("fill-in") flash with either flashbulbs or electronic units. I recall the top-end models with coupled rangefinders and exposure meters could be had with the 4-element Schneider Xenar lens. The later models had larger bright-line viewfinders which were fine even if you wore spectacles - not as good as a Leica M or the Voigtlander life-size type, but pretty fair nonetheless.

Quality was reckoned by the reviewers in UK photo mags to be quite good - maybe not quite equal to the Voigtlander or Retina models, but certainly equal to the Baldessa and other mid-price viewfinder 35s. And, at the time, vastly better than the similarly popular priced Japanese cameras that were starting to appear in Britain. (Anyone recall the Samoca 35?)

A great contemporary source on late 1950s and early 1960s cameras on sale in the Uk would be the series of books published then by Focal Press in London and called "Cameras: the facts". Line drawings showing what did what on the cameras, dimensions, full specs and some dispassionate comments by the reviewers. No sample pics though - you need back numbers of "Amateur Photographer" weekly magazine for that. Try Googling or Ebay for copies.

These low-to-mid priced 35s are largely ignored, but they were crucial to much of the photo industry, firms like Yashica would never have survived making the Pentamatic slr and the like - they needed the profit from the lower-end gear to finance whatever R&D they were doing.