Will

Wilhelm Will was an optics maker in Wetzlar, Germany. Among other products were some camera optics. Better known were its Wilon enlarger lenses and its "Maginon" projector lenses.

In 1988, the company was dissolved into Helmut Hund GmbH. This still operates in Wetzlar, its optical branch now focused on microscopes.

Lenses

Will Wilon 1:4.5/50 enlarger lens image by Hospice of St Francis (Image rights)

• Adoxar (for Adox's Golf cameras)
• Wilon (for Kunik's Petitux cameras)
• Tessar copy and viewfinder for Minox's Minox 35 cameras

Links

• German Wikipedia
• Wilhelm Will thread at the Mikro-Forum (on German)

After Will: Maginon, the trademark

Maginon - after Will's time it was no more a projection lens brand but known among photo enthusiasts as somebody's trademark for photo accessories, from time to time even used for some cameras. In Germany that has changed - there's a maginon.de website advertising several products, among them camera drones and automatic forest cameras for observing wild animals. Thus the brand has still to do with cameras, but very special ones, no more general photography apparatuses, among other products, and it's now in hands of German RCP Handels-GmbH, a trading company, which also owns the Rollei brand now.

A few cameras once sold under the widely known old mAGInOn trade mark label were made by Premier and Goko, and pre-RCP Maginon also offered some photpgraphy accessories, even some very special ones for certain camera types like the Minolta AF-E add-on optics for tele and wide-angle.