Cosina

Cosina aka Cosina Company Ltd. of Nagano, Japan is a Japanese camera maker. The company was founded by Mr. B. Kobayashi in 1959 as a lens factory. Though the company has produced several cameras under its own name, it is better known for making cameras for resale under other labels -- for example it manufactured camera bodies for many better-known camera brands, including Contax, Nikon, Revue, Olympus, Vivitar, and Yashica. Cosina also manufactures the modern Voigtländer Bessa line of cameras and optics, along with the newly revived Zeiss Ikon rangefinder camera and lenses.

In Germany, a lot of Cosina cameras and lenses were marketed by Photo Porst, for many years Germanys biggest photo retailer and mailorder house under their house brand name Porst.

One of Cosina's more interesting camera designs was the E1 Solar, introduced in 1994. The E1, a 35mm film SLR, is powered by rechargeable batteries charged by a small solar panel atop the camera prism housing.

A recent Cosina-branded product was the SW-107, identical to the (silver) Bessa L except for a different top plate, made at the beginning of the Cosina Voigtländer era for areas where Cosina was not authorized to market the Voigtländer trademark. The 107 is hard to find now.

In 2005 Zeiss and Cosina announced a partnership whereby Cosina would manufacture the new Zeiss Ikon RF camera and most of the accompanying M mount lenses.

35mm SLR

• Cosina C1
• Cosina CS
• Cosina CT
• Cosina CX
• E1 Solar
• Cosina GX
• Cosina Hi-Lite

35mm compact

• Cosina 35
• Cosina 35 EE
• Cosina 35 FR
• Cosina CX-1
• Cosina CX-2

Links

• Cosina PDF manuals, alphabetical listing of different manuals including Cosina