I purchased my 4x5 Norma new in 69 and it's marked M69 on both standards. There's also a 43 on the front and 45 on the back. There are no focus locks and the geared segment is nylon or similar.
I still have the receipt and ran across it some months ago. Seems like the cost was around $360 for the basic camera. Put that in an inflation calculator and see what it would be today. To put it in perspective I purchased my first used M2 Leica body in 68 and it was $250.
About $2300.Originally Posted by Don Dudenbostel
http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Sinar history is pretty well documented here
http://www.sinar.ch/category/history/
Too bad. Looks like history is only thing that is left. Company changed hands several times during past few years, melted, there's pretty much nothing/nobody left, but trademark.
Sinar (much like Kodak) entered digital very early with high end E model. Both companies miscalculated market and counted on digital as high end part of future photography ...
and counted on digital as high end part of future photography
If you go back to the years 1968-1969 when Don Dudenbostel bought his Sinar Norma, and if you imagine what would be the answer of an expert in the watch market at the time, he would have predicted that the high-end of watchmaking would be electronic quartz watches and the low-end would be the continuation of affordable mechanical watches, like those cheap mechanical watches made by Timex corp.. And some experts would have added : the medium segment of the market will consist of mixed-technology electro-mechanical watches like made by Elgin in the US and LIP in France since the fifties and Bulova (with a steel vibrating tuning-fork, the legendary Accutron model).
What happened is that electronic watches are now the lower end of the market, mechanical watches compose the higher-end and mixed electro-mechanical watch technologies of the fifties and sixties no longer exist except in watch museums.
Unfortunately I'm not expecting to see the market for mechanical film cameras to become any time soon as profitable as it is nowadays for mechanical watches : the Swiss watch industry makes about 50% of sales in value for the worldwide watch market, most of this $$$ incoming from mechanical watches, mainly luxury $$$$$$ mechanical complicated watches.
However, affordable Swiss mechanical watches did not disappear, on the contrary: for example the SWATCH group will soon introduce on the market a so-called "Swatch Sistem 51" mechanical self-winding movement composed of only 51 parts, 100% Swiss-made in highly-automated top-class production lines.
Too bad for us, a watch is marginally a precision time-keeping instrument, it is also an object of social distinction, a fashion item, whereas a precision Swiss monorail LF camera like one of the Sinars is nothing but an austere precision machine-tool like a latheTry to impress your friends at a party by showing them a lathe!
And even worse: our beloved LF monorail cameras are precision machine-tools of a lost job named: LF professional film photographer ...
Well, several hikers passed me on the trails last weekend with my Norma in use, and they were pretty damn impressed by both the looks and quality of machining, and
commented about it. You just don't see many things like that anymore is this age of disposable electronics whatevers. That's not an uncommon occurrence with that
particular camera. One of them struck up a long conversation and turned out to be a pretty savvy print collector of 19th C images, who also recently inherited a lot
of pro MF and dkrm gear, and was wondering what to sell and what to keep in case he wanted to try a little dkrm printing himself. I'm certainly not a camera collector, but it does give me a good feeling when using something as handsome and functional as a Norma.
from:
"Sinar AG traces its history back to 1865, when Carl August Koch (1845–1897), the second son of a silk dyer from Zurich, travelled to Marseille, France in order to learn the then newly developed wet collodion process. Upon his return to Switzerland, he worked in Langenthal in the Studio "Gyr and Koch" in the 1870s where he took portraits or travelled with his equipment into the Alps and to several Swiss Cities to capture the scenery and create some of the first photographic records of many places. Later he moved on to Schaffhausen, where he advertised his portrait studio in 1879 in a local paper. For some years he worked with the local photographer Alfonse Louis Tronel, but finally set up his own shop in 1886 and moved it to Vordersteig 2, Schaffhausen in 1890. Hans Carl Koch (1885–1934) took the studio over in 1911. He expanded the business catering to the amateur photographers, by selling film and equipment, giving photography classes and operating a laboratory for their processing. In his spare time he wrote poems or expanded with his view camera the extensive collection of local landscape and architectural images that his father started. Due to severe health problems accentuated by economic worries during the Great Depression he died young, passing the business to his wife Käthe Koch-Kübler. Their son Carl Hans Koch (1916–2005) graduated 1937 from Vienna's renowned college of the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt as a professional photographer. During the Second World War he served in the Swiss Army as a Lieutenant in the airforce in a radio unit. He was a very ambitious character with excellent people skills. This trait enabled him to shoot some of the most sought-after portraits in Schaffhausen. He knew his profession thoroughly and was proud of that. He did not enjoy working with the clunky old view cameras that his father left him. Especially commercial advertising work was not one of his pleasures. He therefore thought of a better view camera design, especially on some of the more tedious moments in the military. Thanks to his supportive wife Hildegard Koch-Abegg, who ran the photo business to maintain the family and the development of the new camera, he successfully launched his fully modular view camera system "Sinar" in 1948."
I'm a huge fan of high quality vintage watches and certainly view the internal mechanisms as art in the finer pieces. Beyond this however, for me the engine of a thirties Bugatti, a Tesa micrometer, an original Barcelona chair, an old Sinar camera or a beautiful Schaublin lathe speak exactly the same language and many of my friends share this view. There are "serious" collectors of old comic books. Motorcycles have had a show at the Guggenheim. Who can know what we will see as "art" next ? If the works of Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons qualify, a Sinar certainly should also !
I'm curious when Sinar was first officially imported into the US. I looked at some back issues of the Popular Photography Magazine Directory and for 1963 the US distributor is Karl Heitz Inc. Price shown for the Standard 4X5 is $369 (4X5 Expert $599). In 1967, the distributor is Paillard Inc, longtime distributor of Hasselblad. Prices had jumped to $468 for the 4X5 Standard and $780 for the 4X5 Expert. I don't know if possibly the price increase was due to the change in distributor, because by 1972 the distributor was "PTP Inc., sub. EPOI" and price for the 4X5 Standard was back down to $395, 4X5 Expert $740. I suppose price changes could be due to fluctuations in currency values. My collection of photo magazines doesn't go back much before the early 1960s, so if anyone has literature from the '50s with mention of Sinar US, it would of interest.
I don't recall Sinar advertising in the US amateur photo magazines. Linhof in the 1960s was a regular advertiser in Popular Photography magazine. Possibly Sinar advertized in publications aimed at professional photographers. I seem to remember a Sinar ad in an issue of "International Photo Technique", the quarterly magazine Linhof published, but I believe that was a real rare event for Sinar to advertise there. I need to dig out my collection of IPT and see if I'm remembering correctly.
Robert - Thanks so much for posting the Bugatti engine picture. I've been a lover of Bugatti for over 50 years now, although I don't think I've ever seen one in real life. I need to dig through some old slides and see if possibly there was one at a classic car show in Spokane WA many years ago.
Len
Interesting information Len. And although I was aware of Paillard being the distibutor for Hasselblad, Sinar and of course Bolex, I was not familiar with Karl Heinz Inc. Hopefully someone else here will supply additional information. By the way, as you seem to be in the Seattle area, send me a pm and I'll give you a link to my brother there. He has a small private museum containing his type 57.
There is an image of a camera on the official Sinar website History page dated 1951 depicting a model with a Copal shutter. Interestingly the camera appears to be lacking the focusing lock mechanism, which has now been assumed to be a much later modification ! Perhaps this is the reason some believe this detail was missing on the early cameras.
Link : http://www.sinar.ch/en/category/history/1947-1951/
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