not photo history, but name history

nipponkogakuklub.com/NKK/Saint_NIKON.html

Hi,

IIRC, Canon was originally Kwanon.

Stan

Leica was originally Leitz Camera (Leica)? Leitz is still around I see the name in the Stationery shops.

I did a search and Leitz does Cine cameras and Lenses. I wasn't aware of this.

In the past before Leitz was merged with the excellent Swiss firm Wild, bought up various other companies, fissioned, changed name to Leica and became a fashion brand, thy made microscopes, enlargers etc. plus Leicina amateur cine cameras. The Dygon cine lenses were made in-house wile the zooms were bought in from Schneider.

p

Voigtlander now I think it's Cosina (Japanese) I don't know the origins of Voigtlander. It's a very old name.

Extremely abbreviated below; the convoluted history of this , the worlds oldest lens producer still operating (but not unchanged):Neither people nor companies thrive unchanged through centuries:
:
After Voigtländer started, they produced professor Petzwals lenses in Austria , this was quite long ago,then they moved to Braunscwheig in Germany, was bought by a pharma company, did not start making pills&potions, but continued making very advanced cameras mehanically and optically, until bought by the Zeiss foundation and changing labelling. until the foundation gave up on producing amateur eqipment in Germany. Later Franke&Heideke= Rollei took charge until they went bust and the German trading firm Ring Photo bought rights to the name and eventually outsourced production to Japan where the old lens names are continuously recycled on very high quality lenses.

p.

There are now mostly forgotten Camera Brands which were once popular for their cameras

Sony - Minolta, Minolta is gone now. Chinon I don’t hear of Chinon now.

Ricoh purchased Pentax, they still are around.

Casio stopped making their cameras.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinon_Industries

I had a Chinon SLR back around 1983. Probably a CE 4 or 5 which had auto exposure. I remember it had full auto, aperture priority, shutter priority or manual. At that time all the majors had various implementations of auto exposure. The camera had a winder attachment underneath where you could screw on what they called a Power Winder which you could buy separately - a hollow plastic body that one filled with AA's and an inbuilt motor to wind the film on. It shot 2.5 frames a second compared to the in built motor drive cameras which were typically 5 frames / sec. I mostly used slide film for surfing shots and I had one sequence of 22 shots of one wave at a spot in Indonesia - I think I only took 5 or 6 36 shot rolls with me for a 3 month jaunt. It was a good camera as far as I recall.