Edixa page

Welcome to Peter's
Edixa page

HESE cameras were made by Gebruder Wirgin, or Wirgin Brothers, in Weisbaden. The company is probably best known for its cameras with the word Edixa, or a variation of that, in the name. Many devotees of the top quality German cameras often dismissed them as cheap, and damned them with faint praise. But cheap though they may have been by comparison, and the mechanism may often have sounded a little agricultural, but they usually worked very well and with a few exceptions gained a reputation for rugged reliability.
On his very entertaining website Klaus-Ekhard Reiss tells that he worked for a time at Wirgin where, in contrast to Zeiss Ikon where he served his apprenticeship, manufacturing tolerances on parts were not very tight. Assemblers were expected to adjust things with pairs of pliers and, if necessary, an assortment of small files, to make sure they worked properly. My comment is that whoever assembled my Prismat knew what he or she was doing and wielded the pliers and files to good effect. Maybe the clearances are a bit generous and that’s why it fires with such a clunk, but it keeps on firing.

HOW can I best describe my Edixa Prismat? It was made in the mid 1960s, and it can hardly be called elegant. It’s built like a Panzer tank; it’s heavy, it’s chunky, it’s as ungainly as a space station and the shutter fires with a clunk that scares flocks of birds. And it’s been utterly reliable.
I used it as a second (or should it be third?) camera to my Canons for quite a few years, and I’m ashamed to say so within its hearing but I didn’t take a lot of care of it. I used it in any conditions where I didn’t want to risk the Canons. In the pouring rain, in the snow, on the beach, on a small boat, on dusty building sites and down in the bowels of the earth where I was lowered in a big bucket to take pictures of tunnel boring for London’s Jubilee Line Underground. In all these cases the Canons went in the camera bag and out came the Edixa. It coped with the lot and never let me down once.

Ungainly, but as solid as a tank

     When I retired from taking pictures for money I decided that the Edixa had also earned its retirement so I gave it a clean and a lube and put it in my collection. One day soon I'll give it cosmetic overhaul.
     The lens is a Schacht Travenar-A f/2.8, 50mm, which focuses down to a very useful 0.5m. It’s a Tessar-type four-glass construction with very similar performance to a Tessar, but the auto diaphragm is a shade lazy. It’s an M42 Praktica screw mount so when I was using the camera I put on an East German f/1.8 Oreston, made by the old-established company of Hugo Meyer but rebadged as Pentacon when Meyer was incorporated in the Pentacon ‘Peoples Factory’ group. The Oreston is a six-glass Gauss design with first-class definition and contrast, and I had no complaints about its performance. I also carried a couple of el-cheapo Japanese M42 lenses, one 35mm and one 135mm which I picked up secondhand for a few pounds each and which produced surprisingly good results when stopped down a bit.
     The Prismat is a quite old-fashioned design, but none the worse for that. The shutter speed dial revolves when you wind on so to be on the safe side I always wound on before setting the speed even though it stays the same before and after winding on.
     Speeds from 1/1000 down to 1/30 sec are on the dial, but the slow speeds of 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and 1 sec are set by a lever under the dial. The shutter release button is on the front of the camera body, and there’s a rather neat little sliding button to lock it against accidental exposures. There are two flash sockets under the shutter release, one for bulbs and one for electronic flash. Despite all the hard work it’s done the camera’s still in quite good cosmetic condition except for one piece of leatherette from the side of the pentaprism. That came off somewhere but I’ll replace it when I find a piece with a suitable grain.
     I was recently given another Prismat as a possible parts camera if needed. It had been dropped off a balcony on to a concrete path. The lens was broken, and the plastic top of the pentaprism housing was shattered. But the rest of the camera still worked. You can’t ask much more than that in the way of ruggedness.

THIS is one of the earliest cameras to bear the Edixa name, made in the mid 1950s. It's a pretty basic bottom of the range 35mm viewfinder camera, though there was a model II with a coupled rangefinder.

Mundane? Well, maybe, but still a good little camera

It's pretty ordinary, mundane you might say, with touches of money saving here and there to keep the price down, but reasonably well made.
I got it in a box of cameras I bought at auction some years ago. When I looked at it I found the shutter was sticking, so I put it up on the shelf, turned to more interesting cameras in the box, and more or less forgot about it. The shutter probably only needs cleaning and lubricating which should be a quite simple job as it's a four-speed Vero rim set, but I haven't yet got around to it and it's still on my 'things to do' list. The lens is an f/2.8 45mm Steinheil coated Cassar which doesn't seem to have any marks or fungus. I've never tried a Cassar though it was a very popular lens introduced some time between the wars and used in hundreds of 'family' type cameras. I'ts a simple triplet and I imagine it would give very satisfactory album prints up to about 7x5 inches which is what the camera was intended for.
The money saving touches show in thigs like the two riveted-on half-spools on the take up shaft (but at least they don't fall out and get lost) and the resetting for the frame counter which isn't resetting, you use a coin to turn a screw in the top plate. But it works.