Cameras Named After Their Makers

Ed. note: The previous post is finished and polished up all pretty now, and I added a bunch more to it this morning. Check it out past the break if you'd like. Meanwhile, on another subject....

Dan Boney wrote: "It just occurred to me how often speakers have been named after a creator/person (JBL, KLH, Bose, Carver, Polk, etc…) while cameras have not—the closest being Leitz/Leica and perhaps Polaroid 'Land' camera [named after the Polaroid's inventor, Edwin Land —Ed.], but those are semi-close exceptions. Apparently speaker design is a seemingly much less collaborative effort!"

That's a good thought, but there are exceptions among European cameramakers—Victor Hasselblad was the founder of Hasselblad, for instance [CORRECTION below, in the Featured Comments, by Christer Almqvist —Ed.]. And it doesn't hold true for the makers of small- (and sometimes larger-)volume makers of many field view cameras. I thought of Wisner, Canham, Philips, Gandolfi, and Deardorff right off the bat. Plus there are a lot of older view camera makers that must qualify—there must have been a Burke and a James behind Burke & James, for instance, and ditto for Conley. There was a guy in the UK who made a view camera from a sturdy type of plastic whose name is eluding me at present.

Can anyone think of other camera brands, from now, or not long ago, or in history, that are named after their creator or another person or persons?

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Christer Almqvist: "I don't think Victor Hasselblad was the founder of the company. It was founded in 1841 and the son of the founder started messing around with photography. Obviously with success because in 1888 he became the distributor for Eastman in Sweden. Victor developed a camera for the Swedish Air Force during WWII and in 1948 the first version of the later F 1600 came on the market. Designed, by the way, by the man who designed the first SAAB cars, Sixten Sason."

James Weekes: "Always ignored, the toy cameras named after Diana and Holga Rabinowitz."

Mike replies: Ha ha! He's pulling our legs, folks. According to Wikipedia, the Diana was marketed as a novelty by the Great Wall Plastics Factory in Kowloon, Hong Kong, in the 1960s, and the Holga, designed by Lee Ting-mo and based on the Diana, was originally intended to help poor Chinese families make family portraits.

Dan: "You have forgotten the most successful of them all, Sony. Founded by Italian shoemaker Enrico Vincenzo Sony DeLinguini. He had always wanted a better way to collect pictures of his clients feet (for strictly prurient reasons)."

Mike replies: Dan, meet James. James, Dan.

Comments

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

It might be a slight cheat, but if you add lenses to the mix, especially cine, there’ll be a lot of collaborations.

[Jeff]

Hugo Schrader named his camera company Plaubel, based on the name of his brother-in-law, since he thought it was easier to remember than Schrader. Maybe in Germany.

[Jeff]

Linhof is another one. And Mamiya was named for its designer and founder, Seiichi Mamiya.

[David Saxe]

Leitz and Zeiss.

[Roger Bradbury]

Cribbing from my battered copy of the BJP's* The Big Book (1999), there's a few more.

Corfield, makers of the Periflex, were named after the company started in 1948 by Kenneth Corfield.

Linhof were formed in 1887 by Valentin Linhof.

Vincenzo Silvestri's company started making cameras in the early 1980s.

Walker cameras still make the plastic Titan view cameras, in Wales, UK. They were formed in 1989 by Mike Walker.

I can find no up to date trace of Corfield, but the other companies are still going.

But there was another Walker camera brand, now long gone. In 1880 Wm. H. Walker & Co was founded by William Hall Walker in Rochester, New York. The company eventually became part of Kodak.

*British Journal of Photography.

[Zed]

Do initialisms count? because the M-1, later renamed to the OM-1, is initialized for Maitani (and the 'reborn' OM SYSTEM branding calls that out explicitly in their continued use of it). And then, while at the end it was just Bronica all the ones I've used had 'Zenza' on them for their founder Zenzaburo, and his Brownie camera.

[Mark Sampson]

Valentin Linhof. Carl Zeiss. Anthony & Scoville (Ansco). Masao Tachihara. Voigtlander. Ernst Leitz. Cooke, Dallmeyer, Ross, Bausch&Lomb, Ernst Gundlach (optics). There must be many more.

[Rick in CO]

Linhof, after Valentin Linhof, 1854 - 1929, the oldest camera manufacturer still in business today.

[jp41]

According to Wikipedia: "Linhof is a German company, founded in Munich in 1887 by Valentin Linhof."

"Today Linhof is the oldest still-producing camera manufacturer in the world."

[Sherwood McLernon]

Bakelite? - Leo Baekeland?

[ffoto]

How about Gowlandflex?

[Rob L.]

And then there's the Merrill edition Sigmas, and my ill-fated homemade 8x10 'Landrigan Series 0 Pile of parts in an Ikea bag still', a collector model if ever there was one. Kobayashi-San of Cosina certainly deserves a signature camera, and the DF was Tetsuro Goto's signature even if it didn't bear his name.

It's neat when the folks making the gear love it as much as we do.

[Joseph L. Kashi]

Nagaoka, Gowland, and Ritter large format field cameras.

[Tom Burke]

Nimslo - named for the founders, Jerry Nims and Allan Lo.

[Ilkka]

Arnold and Richter and their Arri movie cameras.

[Richard Man]

I have an 8x10 Gibellini, and a 4x5 Gibellini. Excellent modern view cameras.

[Jeff Sprang]

Can’t forget Peter Gowland’s enormous 4x5 twin lens reflexes, the Gowlandflexes, or Jim Galvin’s compact 6x9 view cameras.

My Galvin kit:

https://flic.kr/p/6R8Nrk

Oh, and Jacques Bolsey’s 35mm rangefinders certainly qualify. I still have the beat up Bolsey B2 that started me off in photography in 1967.

[Peter Cameron]

Bolsey after Jacques Bolsey of Bolex fame. I think I still have a Bolsey camera kicking around somewhere.

[Richard Alan Fox]

The Globuscope 360 degree panoramic camera created by Rick, Ron and Steve Globus in the early 1980’s.
This was initially a 35mm film camera meant to be held over the head of the photographer and it would rotate creating a 360 degree image.
I met one of the brothers doing a demonstration somewhere in NYC of this camera and as President of the Camera Club of New York (Stieglitz’s club that he succeeded from) invited Mr. Globus to give us a demonstration at the club.
He brought a 120 or 220 roll film version of the camera and photographed the members assembled.
Somewhere in my files I have the negative rolled around a tube.

[Nico Maijer]

The name Takumar refers to Takuma Kajiwara, a Japanese-American photographer & painter. His brother, Kumao Kajiwara founded the Asahi Optical Company (a.k.a. Pentax).

Now that we're on the subject of Japanese industrial heritage, you may like this video.

Nico.

[Dave Karp]

That sturdy plastic camera you mentioned is a Walker. I have the folding field camera version. Mike Walker is the founder and designer of the cameras.

[Howard Sandler]

Zenza Bronica for Zenzaburo (Yoshina's) BROwNIe CAmera.

[Crabby Umbo]

I think the view camera you’re thinking of in Britain was the Walker Titan, I know because I wanted one. ABS plastic molded and machined, with stainless steel fixtures. It was a keeper because it was a “self-casing” 4 X 5, but had user interchangeable bellows, from wide angle and regular, and the regular was a truly usable triple extension of 18 inches, unlike the usual 10 to 12 inch bellows on a self casing 4 X 5. I think they still make the wide angle only model, but quit making the full featured regular model early on, like 2013 or 2014. Alas…

[Collin J Örthner]

I use a Wehman 8x10 built for me by by Bruce Wehman from Rockford, Illinois. The camera is built like a tank! They haven't been in production for some years now.

[Doug Anderson]

How about television characters (Kodak Hawkeye) or mythical characters (Kodak Brownie)?

[hugh crawford]

I was always fascinated by the eponymous cameras of Charles Hulcher.
https://www.wired.com/2012/08/hulcher-high-speed-cameras/

Speaking of the Globus brothers, they had their studio just off Sixth Ave on 24th street a little west of Giorgio Gomelsky‘s place. Giorgio introduced us and they were very talented camera designers. They were working on camera idea for photographing the entire interior of the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels in a single exposure per tunnel using a modified document scanner. The technology just wasn’t up to that level in the late 1980s. I think they did build a film camera for the job eventually.

[Dan Khong]

Was JVC named after it's maker? I have an orphaned combo set with wood coned speakers which still work wonderfully after 20 years and into which I plug in my Audio-Technica turntable.

It's not cutting edge technology but analog enough to enjoy a few vinyls spinning around that produce music that have that "space" effect to them.

[ritchie thomson]

A few more from the dim and distant past that haven't been mentioned: Max Baldeweg's Baldina and Baldinette; August Nagel's Nagel Vallende and Nagel Pupille - not many made as he was bought out by Kodak; Reid (British copies of Leica); Thornton-Pickard; Haughton-Butcher, the latter three great names of the British camera industry long moribund.

[Jim Martin]

I have a Zeiss-Ikon Super Ikonta as well as 5x7 and 8x10 Eastman View 2D cameras. There's also the Voigtlander cameras, most recently the line of RF cameras made by Cosina.

[Ilkka]

The first Hasselblad made cameras were called HK. They were aerial surveillance cameras made for the Swedish Air Force. The first civilian model was initially called Rossex after the Ross company that made them (owned by Hasselblad). Before launching the camera, they thought of many possible names for it and eventually decided on Hasselblad, produced by Ross company with help from Kodak.

[Mike Plews]

I would consider buying a Klipschflex provided I didn't have to build a room around it.

[Daniel]

You mean there wasn't really a Yojiro Pentax?

[Jonathan Morse]

@ Dan Khong, JVC stands for Japan Victor. Back in the 1960s, I owned a supercheap TV sold by supercheap Woolworth's under JVC's earlier brand name Nivico, which stood for Nippon Victor.