Super-Frankarette LRII – a German Rangefinder camera from 1959

They don’t make cameras like the Super-Frankarette any more.

Franka-Kamerawerk (Franka being a German region and nothing to do with Franke & Heidecke) was based in Beyreuth, which is about 40 miles north-east of Nuremburg. They started to produce roll film cameras in the 1930s and got into 35mm and 16mm cameras after the war. The Super-Frankarette LRII was a model released in 1959. Although it doesn’t say ‘LRII’ anywhere on the body, lots of quite different camera models used the Super-Frankarette name, so for clarity, I’m going to refer to this camera as the LRII from now on.

The LRII is a hefty rangefinder camera. It wears its contributors on its sleeve, with Gossen’s name on the uncoupled lightmeter, Prontor on the shutter and Schneider-Kreuznach on the lens.

The Super-Frankarette LRII weighs in at 640g. For 1959 it was probably regarded as quite compact. It is 130mm wide, 88mm high and 64mm deep. I does fit in a jacket pocket, but the absence of strap lugs suggests they thought people would use it wrapped in the brown leather case (which my father kept the camera in, but which I’ve always discarded).

Exposure system

The light meter is an uncoupled Gossen branded unit and uses a small selenium cell beside the viewfinder. Once the needle is matched with an index pointer, a number can be read off and set on a combined set of rings around the lens, controlling aperture and shutter speed, allowing a ‘shift’ to higher or lower speeds while maintaining the same exposure.

I had assumed the numbers were EV values, but they are actually one stop out from standard EV numbers as used by Weston on the Euro-Master. The LRII’s twelve value equates to 1/125 at f/4, while the standard EV equivalent should give 1/250 at f/4.

EV came in during the 50s, and the LRII might be using an early implementation/approximation. It is notable that the label ‘EV’ does not occur anywhere on the LRII, despite the numbers obviously doing the same thing in the same way and being close enough that film latitude could deal with the difference.  Perhaps Prontor were dealing with licensing issues?

Lens and shutter

The lens is a 45mm Xenar unit from Schneider-Kreuznach.

The Prontor shutter ranges from 1/300 to B. Values from 1 to 60 seconds are also shown, but, are not selectable. As usual, speeds below 1/15 sound a bit slower than they should – the  more exercised speeds seem fine and this is borne out by the film I ran through the camera. Apertures run from f/2.8 to f/22.

Focus goes down to just under 3ft. The focusing ring, which is close into the body, has two finger indentations to help with focus, but they never seemed to be in quite the right place for me.

Viewfinder

The Super-Frankarette LRII viewfinder has a slightly pinkish hue. In comparison with other cameras it is the rangefinder spot is tinted, the large round patch on the Super-Frankette is nice and clear and this makes focusing with it very easy. The viewfinder also features parallax-correcting bright lines. No other info is shown.

Top plate

The idea is that the film counter is manually set to one of the red ‘A’ markings (20 frames was a standard film length back then rather than 24), pressing a digit on the toothed ring and turning anti-clockwise. The counter is supposed to count down shot by shot, showing how many frames you have left. This is the one bit of the camera that is not working as intended, subtracting anything between 15 and 3 exposures at each operation of the winder, and making everything rather random when it comes to the question — “How far through this film am I”?

Front

Rear

Baseplate

Things to note

The Non-standard bits

My father, who owned this camera, was an instrument maker who repaired and modified a wide range of cameras throughout his lifetime. I think that ‘A’ above is a bit of a UK Number 6 knitting needle which sits where a threaded cable release socket used to be.

All the images of this camera I have found online (there are not a lot), show the glass over the rangefinder window to be inscribed ‘Franka’ and to have a diamond-shaped viewfinder windowset in it. I suspect that this example has had the glass in this section replaced with a bit of plain glass.

Pictures

Conclusions

I was very happy with the results from the Super-Frankarette LRII.

When I was a teenager and learning about the nuts-and bolts of photography, this was the camera my father handed me. It was a good choice as it allowed control of shutter speed and aperture, and was quite good for showing the relationships between different settings. I shot my first self-developed films of a friend’s student band with it – one film lost because I hadn’t realised that you couldn’t load a film into a spiral under a safe light, while the other was just very badly processed.

Using this camera again after all these years has been interesting. Wind-on is smooth and rather nice. I was using it as the same time as a little Minox 35 EL and the difference between the film advance is striking. Although the SLII is a heavy camera, its ‘sit-up-and-beg’ dimensions allowed it to fit into a jacket pocket.

I tended to use my Euro-Master V rather than the built-in meter, but the little Gossen unit appears to be reasonably accurate. Sixty-seven years on, all the critical bits work, and I was impressed with the results from the little Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar lens. Focus is a little awkward – I think a tab at the bottom of the lens would be easier to locate than the tabs either side, but it is quite workable. Rewinding the film with a knob made me appreciate the cranks on more modern cameras, while the random nature of the frame counter was entertaining.

How it played out for Franka-Kamerawerk

The Super-Frankarette LRII would seem to have been a bit of a swansong for Franka-Kamerawerk. In 1958 they were producing half a million cameras a year and employed 150 people. It seems a lot of their cameras were exported and/or rebadged as OGA, Hapo, Revue, Universa, and Alka – and indeed the LRII could easily be rebranded by simply substituting the ring around the lens and the glass over the rangefinder window. In 1962 Franka-Kamerawerk were bought up by Wirgin who were keen on producing 16mm still cameras. Wirgin closed the Beyreuth factory in 1966. One of Wirgin’s employees – Heinz Waaske – worked on an idea for a small camera while at Wirgin, but his bosses were unimpressed. Waaske moved to Rollei who were rather taken with his small camera ideas which developed into the Rollei 35. Wirgin closed down in the early 70s.

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