I bought this camera on eBay for £12 including delivery. It is a 1950s German folding 6x6 medium format camera with a coated anastigmat lens, an unusual single-fold bellows design and a name that varies depending on who you ask. It is called the Gerlach Nixette by some and the Nixon Nixette by others, with a third group preferring Trixette. The naming confusion turns out to have a reasonable explanation, which I will get to.
What I want to lead with is this: this is one of the best £12 you can spend if you have been curious about medium format film photography and you do not want to commit to a £200 Bronica or a £400 Rollei to find out whether you actually like the format. Add another £4 for a roll of Fomapan and another £8 to £10 for development with scans, and you can be holding 12 medium format negatives for less than the cost of a takeaway meal. The Nixette is a delightful little camera, the frames it produces are surprisingly good and the eBay supply is steady because nobody quite knows what to call them.
Caveat. There are caveats. Folding cameras from this era are a gamble. The bellows on some of them have pinholes that you cannot see until you develop the first roll. The shutter mechanisms are old and may not fire at marked speeds. The lens elements may have cleaning marks or fungus. £12 buys you a camera that may or may not be working. Half the fun is finding out. (Mine was working. I got lucky.)
What it is
The Gerlach Nixette is a folding viewfinder camera shooting 6x6cm frames on 120 roll film, giving 12 frames per roll. It was made by Camera-Werk Adolf Gerlach in the Barmen suburb of Wuppertal, in West Germany, around 1954 to 1955. At some point in the mid-1950s, Camera-Werk Adolf Gerlach renamed itself to Camera-Werk Nixon, which is why some Nixettes are badged “Gerlach” and others are badged “Nixon”. Same factory, same camera, different name on the body. The Trixette is a slightly different version of the same design.
The lens is a Supra Anastigmat 75mm f/5.6, an anastigmat lens that I do not have great information on. The “Supra” name does not match any of the major German lens makers of the era (Zeiss, Schneider, Voigtlander, Rodenstock), and the lens is most likely an own-brand product made by Camera-Werk Gerlach themselves or sourced from one of the smaller German optics firms of the period. The lens is coated (the front element has a faint purple-blue sheen visible at the right angle), which was relatively modern for a 1954 consumer camera.
The shutter is a Gauthier Vario, a three-speed leaf shutter common on German folding cameras of the era. Speeds available: 1/25, 1/50, 1/200 + B. That is the entire shutter speed range. No 1/100, no 1/500, just three speeds and bulb. Combined with the f/5.6 to f/16 aperture range, your total exposure flexibility is limited. About six stops of total range from the slowest combination (1/25 at f/5.6) to the fastest (1/200 at f/16).
Focus is from 3 feet to infinity, set by rotating the lens barrel. The focusing ring has a 270-degree throw, which is generous and gives you decent precision for a zone-focus camera. Two red “Happy Snapper” marks on the focus scale (at 10 feet and 30 feet) are pre-calculated zone-focus shortcuts. Set the aperture to a red dot just wider than f/11 and set focus to either 10 feet or 30 feet, then the depth of field gives you usable sharpness across a generous range. For consumer shooting, this is the equivalent of “set it and forget it”.
The viewfinder is a small optical Galilean-type finder built into the top plate. No rangefinder. No focus aid. You estimate the distance to your subject by eye, set the focus ring to match, frame through the optical finder and shoot. It is an exercise in zone focus discipline.
The shutter release on early Nixettes (mine included) is on the body of the camera, on the top plate near the front. On later Trixette II versions, the release moved to a side lever rising up from the lens barrel. The body-mounted release is one indicator that you have an early model.
The unique bellows design
This is the part that makes the Nixette interesting from a longevity perspective.
Most folding cameras from this era use a classic concertina bellows: a long fabric or leather accordion that compresses tightly when the camera is folded and extends out when the lens door is opened. The bellows on a concertina design typically have four or five folds. Each fold is a stress point. Over the course of decades, the corners of those folds wear and develop pinholes. A camera that looks externally pristine can have light leaks through its bellows that ruin every frame on a film.
The Nixette uses a different design. Instead of a long concertina, the lens block is connected to the camera body by a short bellows with one main fold across the diagonal of each side. The bellows compress into a flatter, simpler shape than the concertina equivalent. There are fewer corners to wear through. Pinholes are correspondingly rarer.
This is the main reason I am recommending this camera as a way into medium format. The single biggest risk with any old folding camera is bellows light leaks. The Nixette’s design minimises that risk by an order of magnitude. Mine had clearly been sitting in a drawer for decades when I bought it, and the bellows were still light-tight when I tested it. That would be unusual for an Agfa Isolette or a Voigtlander Bessa from the same era.
The other thing the Nixette has that I appreciated is thick, stiff leather on the bellows. The leather feels resistant and substantial. When you compress it to fold the camera, it does not give the impression of being about to crack. The Kodak Vest Pocket I have from a similar era has bellows that feel almost paper-thin in comparison. The Nixette’s bellows have substance.
On the naming
A short detour on the naming because it took me a while to work out.
The same camera was sold under at least three names: Nixette, Trixette and Trixette II. The badging on the front of the camera depends on which year it was made and which model variant. Some have “Nixette” engraved on the front lens door. Some have “Trixette”. The Trixette II has a slightly different shutter release mechanism (side-mounted lever rather than body release).
To confuse things further, the manufacturer changed its name during the production run. Camera-Werk Adolf Gerlach (the original 1953-54 manufacturer) renamed itself to Camera-Werk Nixon in the mid-1950s. So earlier examples are sometimes referred to as “Gerlach Nixettes” and later examples as “Nixon Nixettes”, even though they are the same camera from the same factory.
For practical purposes, all of these are the same camera. If you are searching eBay, search for “Nixette” and “Trixette” both. The Trixette versions tend to be slightly cheaper because they are less recognised.
Loading the film
Loading is more fiddly than it should be.
The film bay is accessed by opening the back of the camera. The take-up spool is at the top, the supply roll at the bottom (which is the opposite of most 120 cameras of the era). The film winds right to left, which is also the opposite of most 120 cameras. If you are used to loading any other 120 camera, you will get this wrong the first time. I did.
The spring-loaded clip that holds the fresh roll in place is strong. Getting a new roll under that clip took me longer than it should have. The clip is designed to keep the roll from spinning loose, but it grips so hard that you have to push the roll in against significant resistance to seat it correctly.
Once loaded, you wind on by rotating a small knurled wheel set into the left side of the top plate (left as you hold the camera). The frame counter is a classic red window on the back, showing the printed numbers on the backing paper of the film as you wind through. Wind until you see the number 1, then close the back fully and shoot.
There is no double-exposure prevention. As with the Agfa Synchro Box and most cameras of this era, you have to develop a personal habit of “wind on immediately after every shot” or you will end up with overlapping frames.
The shoot at Sharpness Docks
I drove out to Sharpness Docks to test the camera. Sharpness is a small port village on the Severn estuary in Gloucestershire, about ten minutes from my home. I had somehow never been there in the years I have lived nearby. It turns out to be one of the more atmospheric photographic locations in the region: a working dock with old cranes, faded brick warehouses, scrap heaps, lines of trees along the canal towpath and the occasional moored sailing barge. Genuinely photogenic.
I loaded a roll of Ilford FP4 Plus at ISO 125, which is my standard testing film. FP4 is consistent enough that any variations in the results are clearly the fault of the camera rather than the film. I had a separate spot meter with me for exposure measurement (the Nixette has no built-in meter, of course).
Frame 1 was a backlit tree silhouette against the morning sun. I metered at f/16 and 1/200 (or thereabouts; the meter said f/22 but I rounded to f/16 to match the camera’s actual range). Wind on.
Frame 2 was a portrait-from-behind of two old ladies sitting on a bench at the dockside. I asked permission first. They were lovely. One of them looked me sternly in the eye as I was walking away and said “you just take care, man”, which I have been turning over in my head ever since.
Frame 3 was a line of trees vanishing into the distance along a path. Composed for the converging perspective.
Frame 4 was a wider shot of the dock buildings, the massive industrial structures looming against an interesting sky.
Frame 5 was a closer experiment. Razor wire on a fence in the foreground, dock buildings in the background. I set the focus to the closest distance (3 feet) and opened the aperture to f/8 at 1/200 to try to throw the background out of focus. The result depends on how accurate my distance estimation was, which I would not bet on.
Frame 6 was a gate detail.
Frame 7 was a low-angle shot of someone (my reluctant model for the day) lying in the grass. The rangefinder I was using to estimate distance told me 60 feet. I called that nonsense and went with 25 to 30 feet by eye. We will see who was right.
Frames 8 through 12 were various other compositions around the dock. Total shoot time about an hour.
The results
I developed the FP4 in DD-X at home and was pleased with what came out.
The frames are noticeably sharp in the centre. The Supra Anastigmat is doing its job. Edges are slightly softer (this is a cheap anastigmat lens designed for a cheap consumer camera) but the softening is gentle and consistent. The character of the frames is gentle and slightly nostalgic, in a way that suits the subject matter at Sharpness.
The negative of the two old ladies on the bench is the best of the roll. The composition works. The exposure is dead on. The focus is where I wanted it. It is a frame that I am genuinely pleased with.
The razor-wire foreground frame did not work the way I had hoped. At f/8 with the focus at 3 feet, the background should have been noticeably soft, but the depth of field on a 75mm lens at f/8 is more generous than I had estimated. The background is in passable focus. Lesson: for shallow depth of field on a 6x6 folder, you need a faster lens than f/5.6 and a closer subject than 3 feet. The Nixette is not the camera for bokeh.
The Happy Snapper zone-focus marks worked on the frames where I used them. The wider shots of the dock buildings (where I set the focus to 30 feet and the aperture to f/11) are sharp across the frame. The Happy Snapper system is a clever bit of consumer engineering. Set, frame, shoot, wind on.
Verdict: brilliant value for the money
I think this is one of the best cheap entry points into medium format film photography that exists.
For £12 plus a roll of FP4 and the cost of development, you get:
- A genuinely usable 6x6 medium format camera
- Better build quality than you have any right to expect at this price
- A unique folding design that reduces the bellows-failure risk that kills most other folders of this era
- A coated anastigmat lens that produces frames sharper than most people expect
- Zone-focus shortcuts that make the camera easy to shoot without a rangefinder
- Twelve negatives per roll, each one five times the size of a 35mm frame
The catches are the limitations you would expect from a cheap 1950s consumer camera. Three shutter speeds. Six stops of total exposure range. No rangefinder. No meter. No close focus (3 feet is the closest you get). Slow lens (f/5.6 wide open).
But for the price of a takeaway pizza, you get to find out whether you actually like the slower, more deliberate pace of medium format. If you decide you love it, you can move up to a Bronica or a Rolleiflex or a Mamiya RB67 and never look back. If you decide it is not for you, you have lost £25 to £30 total.
Buying tips
If you are going to buy a Nixette or a Trixette on eBay:
- Search both names. The Trixette versions are often cheaper because they are less recognised.
- Check the bellows in the listing photos. Look for any visible creasing, cracking or shine that suggests wear. The single-fold design is more robust than concertina, but a Nixette that has been left folded for sixty years in a damp loft will still have problems.
- Check the lens elements. A bit of dust is fine. Fungus (looks like a network of threads inside the glass) is bad news and almost impossible to clean.
- Check the shutter. If the seller has any way to confirm that the shutter fires, that is worth knowing. The Vario shutters of this era can stick.
- Expect to pay £10 to £20 for a working example. Anything above £30 is overpriced.
If yours arrives and the shutter is sluggish, a few firings with the back open will sometimes free it up. If it does not free up, the shutter can be cleaned by a competent repairer for £30 to £50, which makes the camera economically borderline.
Next time
The next video on the channel is a second-chance Sunday with my Rolleicord III, where I am giving another folding-era 120 camera (this one a TLR rather than a folder) a full review. After that, the Agfa Synchro Box, which I covered in a recent piece (a 1950s box camera from the same Camera Rescue outlet box that supplied the lens for my 4x5 setup).
If you have a Nixette, a Trixette or any of the other 1950s German folders and you have tips or shots to share, the comments are open. There is a lot of charm in these cameras, and a small community of people who shoot them regularly.