Argus

Argus buildings:

Argus Building, 535 West William Street now an office building, home of the Argus Museum

Characteristic house corner of a former Argus building that became part of the University

The entrance of that building

The entrance of another Argus building

C3 and C3 Matchmatic

Argus Inc. was a camera maker based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Before 1939 it was International Research Corporation, a department of International Radio Corporation, Ann Arbor. It was the American company that popularized the modern cartridged 35mm film in the U.S., especially by its characteristically brick-shaped rangefinder cameras. The first camera of Argus, the Argus A, resulted from a patent that the company received in 1936. Before that time the company had produced radios, among them some bakelite models.

Argus became a great name in the Ann Arbor's economy. Several buildings of its heydays are still known as Argus building. One of these pearls of the city's brick architecture has become a modern office building now, with a public area where a permanent exhibition of Argus cameras is shown, the Argus Museum.

Some Argus products were OEM products made by other makers.

image 1940's, by Charles Dunlap

List of Argus Cameras

A-series

• Argus A
• Argus A2B
• Argus A2F
• Argus AA
• Argus A3
• Argus AF
• Argus B
• Argus FA

A-series Links

• 35mm For The Proletariat: A Modern User's Guide To The Argus A/A2 Camera

C-series

• Argus C
• Argus C2
• Argus C3
• Argus C3 colormatic
• Argus C3 Golden Shield
• Argus C3 MatchMatic
• Argus C3 Standard
• Argus C33
• Argus C-twenty

Autronic Series

• Argus Autronic 35
• Argus Autronic C3
• Argus Autronic I
• Argus Autronic II

TLR

• Argus 40
• Argus 75* Argus Super Seventy-Five
• Argus Argoflex
• Argus Argoflex E
• Argus Argoflex EF
• Argus Argoflex EM
• Argus Argoflex Forty
• Argus Argoflex II
• Argus Argoflex Seventy-Five

Other

• Argus 21

• Argus A-Four
• Argus C4
• Argus C44
• Argus C44R
• Argus C4 Modified
• Argus C4R
• Argus Model M
• Argus 127 (Whitehouse Products)
• Argus CR-2 (Chinon)
• Argus/Cosina STL 1000 (Cosina)
• Argus Lady Carefree and Argus Flash Sensor 235x (Sedic)
• Argus V-100 (German OEM)

Sources

Links

• Argus C: the first best-selling 135 film camera (1938), at DCView (in Chinese, English translation)
• The Argus Museum: Ann Arbor's Hidden Treasure (PDF), by Henry Gambino, at The Argus Museum
• Argus page at Collection G. Even's site
• Various Argus Camera at Sylvain Halgand's collection
• Argus Camera Historyon the Argus Company site
• Argus Camera Photographers Group and Pool on Flickr
• When was my Argus camera made?, by Phillip G. Sterritt, at Photo.net
• Argus still camera and slide projector reference guides, by Phillip G. Sterritt, at Photo.net

Manuals

• Listing of different Argus instruction manuals in PDF format

Books

• Henry J. Gambino: "Argomania", 2005