Luigi Colani 1928–2019

Luigi Colani

-

Written by Adam Richardson

The man who made SLRs look and feel the way the do, Luigi Colani, died yesterday at 91.

Until the recent turn toward more angular and retro cameras, a lot of SLRs/DSLRs looked much the same, as you know, and all can trace their lineage back to the work the German industrial designer Luigi Colani did for Canon, specifically the Canon T90. Colani was a flamboyant designer who pushed a concept of biomorphism, and his vehicles in particular were pretty crazy-looking.

Here’s an article about him.

And here’s my own humble write-up/photo essay on the T90, which pioneered not just the shape of SLRs for the next 30 years (seriously, compare the grip and shutter button area of it to the EOS 1D of the last couple years—they're almost identical), and also the button/thumbwheel control combination that we take for granted today, which had never, to my knowledge, been used on any product of any kind up till that point in 1986.

Just to give a sense of how big of a leap the T90 was, compare it to its predecessor, the famous AE-1, which stuck to the classic aluminum/leather sandwich look. Then the EOS 1D, some 30 years later, looks hardly changed from the T90 despite bearing almost no resemblance to it "under the hood."

He designed many products in a wide variety of categories. The T90 was one of his more tame designs. He did some other really wild concepts for Canon, shown lower down on this page.

Luigi Colani died after a severe illness in the town of Karlsruhe, on the Rhine river west of Stuttgart.

Adam

Adam Richardson's Instagram is @massmadesoul

Original contents copyright 2019 by Adam Richardson. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany • B&H Photo • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

J Williams: "The modern camera world owes Luigi a big debt. A Canon T-90 was my first 'serious' camera. Nothing remotely like it at the time. The grip felt like Luigi had taken a lump of clay, grasped it in his hands and then said 'make the grip like this.' At the time I could not imagine why anybody would buy any other SLR. That's how far ahead it was compared every other SLR in existence at the time."

JohnW: "The T90 was definitely a seminal design and the culmination of the A series manual cameras. The F1 was around in its native form till 1994. But there's a big evolutionary gap between the T90 and the EOS 1D series. The first 'enthusiast' EOS film camera to followed the T90 design pattern was the EOS 650 in 1987; the family resemblance is unmistakable.

"The 650 was the first of five similar bodies with varying feature sets between March '87 and September '89 when the EOS 1 arrived. The EOS 1 was clearly a modernized T90 with AF and the new EOS lens mount and immediately endeared itself to the pro shooters and the upper-end amateurs. I had bought a 620 the year before and seriously coveted one but never could quite justify the plunge. The film series EOS 1's all had detachable battery grips and the early L series lenses were limited to a 28–70mm ƒ/2.8 and a 80–200mm ƒ/2.8. They were both excellent lenses for their time, but the 80–200mm had a flush rear element so was not tele-converter adaptable.

"With the combination of the T90 derived design and the EOS technology, Canon dominated the SLR market for the next 20 years and ate Nikon for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It wasn't till the arrival of the Nikon D2 that Nikon retook its appropriate place in the market. Canon still has the largest market share even today due in no small part to the lead they leveraged from combining the lessons of the T90 with the EOS system. And yes, Canon set the pace and the market followed in both general design/layout and technology.

"Thank You Mr. Colani. RIP."

GrantC: "I was running a camera store when the T90 was introduced. They were extremely difficult to sell, partly because of the then-extreme styling, but also because the earlier T-series had set the expectation for dubious construction quality. Most customers associated the T90 with the unrelated T50 and T70, and the much higher price tag caused them to look at the more 'traditional' bodies. For years the AE-1 was the most popular SLR sold, and those users who wanted a 'better' camera and wanted to stay in the Canon line bought the A-1. Those customers didn't see the T90 as a viable successor. Some went to the New F1, and others traded in their FD-mount equipment to buy into the EOS system when the 650 and 620 were introduced the following year. Once the EOS cameras were out, T90 sales—at least in our stores—came to a crashing halt. I've always thought that if Canon had made the nameplate more professional looking, rather than using the cheap cartoonish screen-printed logo it used on the lesser models, they'd have sold far better."

Paulo Bizarro: "To this day, the EOS 1V remains the camera I most enjoyed shooting with. A large part of that is due to the ergonomic design of the EOS family, coming from the T90."

Comments

[c.d.embrey]

Colani designd everything! His bathrooms were eye-catching, to say the least https://i.pinimg.com/736x/7a/57/1a/7a571a94a78cea3fa712ea13b2ebe756--pink-bathrooms-retro-renovation.jpg And Teapots for Rosenrhal http://media.vam.ac.uk/media/thira/collection_images/2009CB/2009CB8717_jpg_l.jpg

[David Evans]

Colani was good at designing camera bodies, where he was somewhat constrained by the existing components. His designs for big aircraft were frankly ludicrous - he assumed engines which did not exist and never could exist. You can't design a supersonic wing by the same aesthetic principles as a subsonic wing - the laws of flow are simply different.

I guess I resent him because I was continually being excited by the look of his designs and coming down to earth with a bump when it became obvious they were simply not functional.

[Tim Bradshaw]

Thos is sad news. But I had not realised until reading the article you referenced quite how much DSLR design and 1970s Yes album covers are, really, the same thing. This explains why I am simultaneously repulsed and strangely attracted by both. Only Pentax seem to have got anywhere near the true colour-palette needed.

[Steve Jacob]

I never liked the T series, or the 'big grip' SLR idea, nor is it ergonomically sound.

When your hands are at eye level that close to your face, the natural forearm angle is near vertical.

The big grip forced us to contort the wrist so that the hand was horizontal, with the result that a lot of DSLR users hunch forward.

It was a terrible ergonomic design for steady shooting, but good for packaging larger batteries required for AF lenses.

Personally, I held on to my AE1P as long as I could.

[Bill Allen]

A good part of the reason I switched from the EM-5 II to the GX8 was the grip. Before the EM-5 II, I’d used Canons from the Elan IIe to the 5D to the 1D II. The EM-5 II never felt right because it lacked a Colani-style grip that I’d taken for granted. The GX8 got it right though, and despite being larger, was much easier to hold.

[Tam]

“I never liked the T series, or the 'big grip' SLR idea, nor is it ergonomically sound.

When your hands are at eye level that close to your face, the natural forearm angle is near vertical.”

I just remembered that I still have half a roll of film in the Photura.

[Barry Reid]

Sad news regardless of Cameras. The world is always poorer when a true original like Colani passes.

On the T90; I chose the T90 over the Contax 167 for my 21st birthday back in 1990 because of that wheel. The coherence of the T90’s handling and design, along with its brilliant spot metering, kept me in the FD system through the AF SLR era until going digital 15 years later. While the T90 (and to an extent the T80 were clearly test beds for the EOS, the early EOS 6xx bodies lost the detail in the sculpting of the body and grip making them feel far inferior in the hand. The 1-series are definitely more closely aligned and carry on the T90’s spirit/DNA more clearly.

The Eos 1Ds I moved to was both familiar yet completely different and seemed almost comically large.

I still have a pair of T90’s and just acquired a couple of lenses as I’d decided to get the original out and shoot a couple of rolls in time for my forthcoming 50th.

[Dave Jenkins]

One thing I especially like about my Fuji X-T series cameras is that they take me back to the classic, pre-T90 camera shape.

[Timothy Auger]

Hmmm.

Personally I preferred the look and feel of the AE-1, which served me well until the late 1990s. Those curvy, bulbous cameras seem very unattractive to me, rather like the curvy external decorative features bad architects put on shopping malls these days.

[Martin D]

My sincere respect to Luigi Colani. His influence on camera design is immense, and your comparison of the Canon AE-1, T90 and EOS1D is the perfect illustration. The first two almost concurrent in time but separated by a generational gap, but the second two almost identical in haptic philosopy, despite the decades that separate them.

For me personally, like for some of your other commentators, those friendly grips never worked. Today's Fuji XPro2 is of course much closer to the AE-1 than to the T90.

Our fellow TOPer Steve Jacob has I think nailed it: "When your hands are at eye level that close to your face, the natural forearm angle is near vertical." Exactly. The full grip makes this vertical position harder to do, whilst the absence of a grip brings it about in a natural way.

Ergonomic perfection, for me: the austere efficiency of a Leica IIf.