[rollei_list] Re: OT: Xenar
- From: Marc James Small <msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 18:28:51 -0400
At 02:58 PM 9/24/05 -0700, Jerry Lehrer wrote:
>Marc,
>
>What was the Leitz part number or code word for that?
Jerry
Leitz didn't sell these; JSK marketed them.
The Fair Trade Laws of the 1940's and 1950's allowed a manufacturer to set
the price of a kit if it was sold entirely with factory materials. Thus,
Leitz could fix the price charged by, say, Peerless or Willoughby or
Central Camera when these places sold it with a Leitz lens. But Leitz
could not fix the price when the camera body was sold with a Schneider or
Zeiss or Cooke lens and the fiscal interest in pushing these discount sales
was significant. Look at the camera magazines of the era for examples of
this.
Zeiss lenses were not marketed actively after the War but dozens of other
houses stepped in, and there was always a hunger for more given the
popularity of Leica C and F bodies. For instance, when the Bell & Howell
Foton died an early death, the remaining Cooke Amotal lenses were purchased
by either Peerless or Willoughy (they were jointly owned at that time, so
the records are a bit murky) and shipped off to Italy to be remounted in an
amazingly crude but workable coupled LTM. Rodenstock, Staeble,
Voigtländer, Steinheil, and many others joined in the feeding frenzy and,
of course, by the early 1950's a slew of Japanese, Italian, and Soviet
lenses were tossed into the pool as well.
Zeiss Ikon was then run in the US by Dr Bauer, the fellow who began the
process which led to the development by Smakula of lens coatings. Under
the Alien Properties Act of 1942, Carl Zeiss USA (and, of course, Ernst
Leitz NY) had been taken over by the US government. Leitz managed to
remain fairly well tied to Leitz in Wetzlar and toed the party line in the
eight or nine years before they were repurchased, ultimately, by Leitz.
Carl Zeiss USA, however, remained US property until 1960 and Dr Bauer
played really fast and loose with the rules the German firm attempted to
impose -- for instance, he did not attempt to control selling prices on
Zeiss Ikon cameras and aggressively imported East German gear as well
including the Contax S and D lines and the Praktica cameras to the furty of
the mavens of Stuttgart. ELNY was never a huge commercial success but Carl
Zeiss USA boomed, and the US government viewed it as a cash cow. They knew
that Bauer was going to get the axe as soon as they allowed the Zeiss
Foundation to repurchase the US branch, so they held onto it until Dr Bauer
qualifed for retirement under German law, and then returned it, for a tidy
sum, to German control, Dr Bauer moving off, I recall, to Arizona.
As a result of this, there was never the demand for Contax RF BM
aftermarket lenses but, even so, more than a few firms marketed these; the
Cook Amotal and Voigtländer Nokton in this mount are quite rare but not
unknown.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
NEW FAX NUMBER: +540-343-8505
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