Plaubel

Plaubel — history

Plaubel began in Frankfurt in November 1902, and its origin already hints at the company’s character. Hugo Schrader had trained at Voigtlander and then worked for the Frankfurt maker and distributor Dr. R. Krugener. When he and his wife started their own concern, they chose the surname of her brother, Karl Plaubel, because Schrader considered it easier to remember than his own. The first Christmas catalog offered cameras, lenses, and accessories from a dealer-maker that had not yet settled into one signature product. That blend of commerce, practical mechanics, and optical ambition would remain visible throughout Plaubel’s life. It was never simply a mass-market camera brand. At its best, it made highly purposeful equipment for photographers who knew exactly why they needed movements, a large negative, or a camera that folded into a surprisingly small package.

The first cameras appeared after several years of lens work. Plaubel’s Precision Peco of 1909 established the Peco name, which would later become inseparable from the firm’s studio and technical cameras. The more famous breakthrough followed almost immediately. The Makina was shown in 1911 and introduced in 1912, using crossed scissor struts to move the lens standard away from the body. This was an ingenious way to combine rigidity with portability. Early Makinas included conventional and stereo forms, and the family gradually became a press camera rather than a single fixed design. The key idea was durable: a serious plate camera could collapse into a manageable shape without giving up the controls and interchangeable components that professionals expected.

Plaubel’s interwar history is best understood as steady refinement rather than a clean succession of annual models. Hugo’s son Goetz Schrader joined the company in the mid-1920s, took charge of technical development around 1930, and soon became co-owner. The Makina I and Makina II developed the 6.5 by 9 centimeter plate-camera platform with coupled rangefinding and interchangeable lenses. A smaller Makinette appeared in 1931, while the Roll-Op family addressed roll-film users. Period and museum evidence confirms important landmarks, but the suffixes attached to some Makina II variants are not yet secure enough to force into a tidy modern taxonomy. For collectors, the useful lesson is to identify the camera in front of them by its controls, lens interface, format, and engraving rather than trusting a seller’s shorthand.

The Makina system was also a lens story. Plaubel’s Anticomar became the familiar standard name, with the 100mm f/2.9 strongly associated with the 6.5 by 9 centimeter cameras. A surviving Makina IIS booklet describes the Speed Change arrangement and offers a 73mm f/6.8 Wide-Angle Orthar, the 100mm f/2.9 Anticomar, and a 190mm f/4.8 Tele-Makinar, along with a Tele-Peconar extension outfit. It also makes a crucial identification point: the camera serial and lens serial occupy different places and should not be treated as one numbering sequence. This modularity made a compact press camera unusually versatile, but it also created today’s cataloging traps. A loose lens, a shutter, and a body may each carry numbers and may not have left Frankfurt together.

Hugo Schrader died in 1940, leaving Goetz to lead the business through its most difficult period. During the Second World War the factory was redirected toward precision military work, and bombing in 1944 caused severe damage. Plaubel rebuilt after 1945, but the postwar company did more than resume the old Makina. It increasingly placed view cameras at the center of its professional identity. The Peco Supra arrived in the 1950s, followed by Junior and Universal platforms that offered movements, revolving backs, interchangeable bellows, and adapters for several film sizes. The German Makina line continued through the IIIR before ending around 1960, closing one chapter just as Plaubel’s monorail systems were becoming more ambitious.

The early 1960s produced some of Plaubel’s most unusual cameras. The Brooks-Plaubel Veriwide 100 joined an American concept to German manufacture and a fixed Schneider Super-Angulon 47mm f/8 lens, exposing a broad 6 by 10 centimeter frame on 120 film. The Makiflex and Pecoflex, introduced around 1963, approached large-format reflex photography from different mechanical directions. Both supplied through-the-lens viewing and a focal-plane shutter, but the Pecoflex added a movement-capable monorail front standard. These were specialized solutions rather than volume products. They reveal a company willing to explore the edges between press camera, view camera, and single-lens reflex when ordinary categories did not quite meet a working photographer’s needs.

Peco Profia became the mature expression of the view-camera side of the business. The original system, introduced across 1967 and 1968, covered formats from 9 by 12 through 18 by 24 centimeters in V, N, and Z configurations. Its tall paired posts made the standards visually unmistakable and allowed generous rise and fall. Shared boards and a network of rails, bellows, backs, and adapters turned the camera into a platform rather than a sealed product. Later Profia PL1, PL69D, NT, and ZT versions carried that logic into an era of international backs, roll film, and digital adapters. The family name endured, but accessories should not be presumed interchangeable across every generation without checking board dimensions and fittings.

In 1975 Goetz Schrader sold Plaubel to Kimio Doi’s Japanese group and remained involved in management. The sale did not simply relocate the old Makina tooling. It opened a second, deliberately modern Makina chapter. A Frankfurt Makinette 67 prototype did not reach series production, while the commercial Makina 67 was designed and built in Japan around a fixed Nikkor 80mm f/2.8. Its scissor mechanism echoed the classic cameras without reproducing their system of interchangeable lenses. Patent records from Goetz Schrader’s late work document continuing attention to the linkage, focusing, and latch mechanism. Reports differ on the exact factory sequence, so the safest description is Japanese contract manufacture using Nikon optics and Copal shutter components, with Mamiya associated with later production.

The Japanese family was small but carefully differentiated. The Makina 67 paired a coupled rangefinder with its newly designed six-element 80mm Nikkor. The wide-angle W67 used a fixed 55mm f/4.5 Wide Nikkor and omitted the rangefinder approach of its standard-lens sibling. The Makina 670 revised the 80mm camera with conveniences including 220-film handling and a hot shoe. A separate 69W Proshift used a Schneider Super-Angulon 47mm f/5.6 and offered lens shift for architectural work. Production ended in 1986 amid the disruption surrounding Mamiya’s bankruptcy. These cameras share Plaubel branding and compact bellows engineering, but they are not interchangeable-lens descendants of the German Makina in a mechanical sense.

Frankfurt nevertheless remained important after the Doi acquisition. Parts manufacture for the German professional cameras was reportedly transferred in 1979 to Wilhelm Gutmann, while Plaubel continued assembly and supported the Profia line. The company also distributed equipment from other professional makers, including Toyo and Horseman, but distribution does not turn those products into Plaubel designs. By 2012, sources still listed PL1, PL69D, NT, and ZT view-camera models. A contemporary notice reported that Plaubel ended sales and repairs for Plaubel, Toyo, and Horseman products on May 31, 2017. That is the clearest practical endpoint for the photographic operation found in this research, and it should not be stretched into a claim that every legal or corporate trace vanished on that date.

That distinction matters because a current registry-data service still lists Plaubel GmbH as an active Frankfurt entity under HRB 15086. Corporate registration is not evidence of present camera manufacture, just as the reported end of camera service is not automatically proof that the legal entity dissolved. The careful publication wording is therefore two-part: documented photographic sales and service ended in 2017, while the registered company appears to remain active. Anyone updating that present-tense statement should consult the official German commercial register, since directors, addresses, and status can change more quickly than the historical camera record.

Plaubel’s lasting achievement is the way it pursued portability without abandoning professional control. The early Makina folded a plate camera around a scissor linkage; Peco and Profia made complex movements systematic; the Japanese Makinas put a large 6 by 7 centimeter negative behind fixed high-grade optics in a travelable body. That continuity is more revealing than a simple list of models. It also gives collectors a sound identification method: establish whether an object belongs to the German Makina system, a Peco or Profia platform, a collaboration such as the Veriwide, or the Japanese fixed-lens family. Then verify its format, interface, engraving, and separate body and lens serials. Plaubel’s catalog is intricate, but its engineering intentions remain remarkably clear.