This one was a complete accident. I had bought a box of cameras at auction a few weeks earlier, mostly to get hold of a Yashica A that was listed in the lot description. The box also included a Minolta CDS 3, which I knew about, and a lot of junk, which I expected. What I did not expect was the small folding camera at the bottom of the box, hidden underneath everything else and in startlingly good condition for its age. The lot description had not mentioned it at all.
The camera is a Krauss Rollette Luxus, made in Stuttgart sometime around 1928 to 1931. It is covered in what looks very convincingly like snake skin (the more accurate label is probably faux snake skin in a beige patina). The bellows are leak-free and the lens elements are clean. The shutter still fires close enough to its marked speeds to use. For a camera between ninety and ninety-five years old this is not nothing. It is the oldest camera I have ever held that still works.
A short history of G.A. Krauss
G.A. Krauss was a small German camera maker founded in 1895 by Gustav Adolf Krauss in Stuttgart, originally as a trader and manufacturer of photographic goods. The company produced cameras under its own name from the mid 1920s until 1936, when the camera business was sold. The Stuttgart photo shop carried on under the Krauss name until 1991, eventually being absorbed into Photo Porst.
Krauss were never one of the big German camera makers. Total Rollette production over twelve years came to fewer than fifty thousand units, and roughly half of those were in the final three years of the run. By the end of the 1920s Krauss were being out-competed by the giants forming around them. Zeiss Ikon had consolidated into a major operation. Agfa were industrialising at scale. Meanwhile Voigtländer were entering the rollfilm market in earnest and August Nagel was setting up what would become Kodak’s Stuttgart factory. Krauss did not survive the decade as a major maker. They moved into 35mm briefly in the 1930s but never reached the volumes of the bigger competitors.
The Rollette itself was announced in 1923 and was in the market from about 1924 to 1931. It was designed to compete with the Vest Pocket Kodak format but produce a substantially larger negative on the slightly larger 129 film. There were several variants of which the Luxus was the top of the range. The Luxus is identifiable by its leather or snake-skin covering instead of the matt black of the standard models, and by the upgraded rim-set Compur shutter and better lenses behind it. Mine has a Rollar Anastigmat 8cm f/4.5, which sits behind a Compur shutter that goes up to 1/300 of a second.
The Rollette claims, at the time of its launch, to have been the first German camera built specifically for the 5x8cm format on 129 film. Aimed at the vest pocket market, it is roughly the same size in the hand as the Vest Pocket Kodak but produces a negative about forty per cent larger. There was no shortage of ambition.
The 129 film problem
129 film was introduced by Kodak in 1912 for the British Ensignette No. 2. It sits between 120 and 127 in width, and is the only roll film format for which Kodak themselves never actually made a camera. It was always a niche format. It was discontinued decades ago and there is no manufacturer making it today. There is also essentially no chance of it being reintroduced, because the population of 129 cameras still in circulation is too small to support a film run.
I had bought the camera assuming it was 127, which is the format I am most familiar with for cameras of this size. The first time I tried to load it, with a roll of Rerapan 400 in the 127 size that I had on the shelf for my other compact cameras, I realised the spool would not fit. The 129 spool that was already in the camera was visibly wider and had a different fitting at the top end where it engages with the wind mechanism. The roll I had brought was the wrong format. So was every other roll I owned. The camera had been designed for a film that had not been manufactured in something like fifty years.
This was, briefly, the end of the experiment.
The 127 to 129 workaround
Then I did some reading and found a workaround that had been written up by Analogue Wonderland in a piece about shooting 127 film in a similar 129 Voigtländer folder. The principle is straightforward. A 127 spool is shorter than a 129 spool by about half a centimetre. If you can fill that gap with something, the shorter 127 spool will sit in the 129 chamber and turn freely. The take-up spool needs to be the original 129 spool that came in the camera, because the toothed top fitting that engages with the wind mechanism is different between the two formats.
The hard bit is the spacer. The piece I read had used a 3D-printed adapter. I do not have a 3D printer. So I went out to the workshop and rummaged for something the right thickness that would slot onto the bottom centre pin of the 127 spool and bring it up to 129 height. The answer turned out to be a nut from the nuts and bolts drawer. It was just shy of half a centimetre thick and exactly the right inside diameter. It slid neatly onto the pin and held the 127 spool in approximately the right position with no friction.
The other thing I needed to work out was framing. 127 film paper backing has frame numbers on the back to suit either 4x4 or 4x6.5 negatives. The Rollette wants a 5x7.5 frame. Neither of the printed number sequences map cleanly to what I needed. I decided to wind on two frame increments and hope. The sequence would run one, three, five and seven, giving me roughly five exposures from a roll. I would rather have fewer overlapping frames than too many.
A walk at Clifton Downs
I took the loaded camera up to Clifton Downs in Bristol on a flat autumn day. The Downs are a wide open space above the Avon Gorge, the kind of place a 1920s photographer might have taken their new folder for the same reason I took the Krauss out there. Plenty of subjects, none of them moving fast.
A few practical things became immediately obvious. The Rollette has no rangefinder. Focus is set by estimating distance and turning a small wheel on the front standard, marked in metres. For anything wider than about three metres the depth of field is generous enough not to matter much. For close subjects you are guessing.
The shutter release is on the front of the lens housing rather than on the top plate, and it has almost no travel and no resistance. Touching it accidentally is more or less the same as deciding to take a photo. I lost one of my four planned frames this way, putting my finger on the release while composing and only realising once I heard the shutter fire. That is the kind of mistake you can afford to make a few times on 35mm. On a roll that gives you five frames you feel it.
I came back from the Downs with four frames committed to the film. Three I had taken deliberately. One was the accidental misfire of a hedgerow I had been pointing the camera at when my finger slipped.
Developing and looking at the results
In the dark bag I took the camera apart frame by frame rather than trusting the workaround spool fit during a rewind. The fact that the 127 was sitting on a nut at the bottom rather than properly seated made me cautious about putting it under any winding tension I did not need to.
The negatives came back interesting. The Rollar Anastigmat is uncoated, as you would expect from a 1928 lens, and the contrast and tonal range are softer than a modern coated lens would give. That softness has its own quality. There is a kind of low-contrast tonal smoothness across the mid-tones that suits old grass and old stone.
There is also a problem. Looking at the frames on the light table, one side of every image is in sharp focus and the other side is noticeably softer. This is not field curvature or depth of field at the chosen aperture. Looking at the camera from the side with the bellows extended, the lens and shutter assembly is visibly not quite parallel with the film plane. There is a slight tilt that ninety-odd years of being closed and reopened has put into the front standard. You could in theory bend it back, but bending ninety-year-old metalwork carries the risk that the metal will not bend back so much as snap.
I have left the tilt alone. The pictures are what they are. As a record of what a 1920s folder could do with a 1920s lens, they are honest. As a portfolio addition they are not.
What I think of it
The Krauss Rollette Luxus is the most beautiful camera I have ever held. The patina on the snake skin, the rim-set Compur shutter mechanism, the engraved lens housing, the absolute economy of every mechanical component are all so satisfying to interact with. The fact that it still works at all is a small miracle of how things used to be built.
I am not really a collector though. I had already decided before I shot the test roll that I would pass this one on to someone who would actually treasure it. The result of the shoot only confirmed that decision. The tilted front standard means it is no longer a camera I would use for proper work, and propping it on a shelf is not something I do with cameras. Someone out there will want to display this one properly and bring it out occasionally to shoot a roll. That person is not me.
So it will go on the market once I have written this up and once it has had its moment on the channel. I hope it finds a good home. I will probably miss it more than I expect to. Holding a working camera that is older than my grandparents would have been when it was new is not an everyday experience and it has left a small mark.
If you have one of these and you want to shoot it, the 127-in-129 workaround does work. A nut from the workshop is all the engineering you need. Wind by two frame numbers if your camera takes a 5x7.5 frame. Watch your finger on the shutter release. And remember that the lens that ground this glass came out of a workshop in Stuttgart somewhere between the wars, made by people whose names are mostly forgotten now. There is something genuinely moving about pressing a shutter that connects you to that.