Wirgin
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| This Edixa is similar to a earlier camera model of Franka |
Wirgin was a German company which is still known for its brands Wirgin and Edixa, and for its camera types like the Edina, the Edinex or the Gewirette. It was based in the Hessian capital Wiesbaden and made a line of quite inexpensive 35mm SLRs from the 1950s to the 1970s, including the Edixa Reflex and Edixa-Mat Reflex. Wirgin was West Germany's main producer of SLRs with focal plane shutter. It also produced some of the lenses for its cameras, among them several M42 screw mount lenses.
Wirgin was already active before World War II and had made a small 3×4cm camera using 127 film, the Gewirette, as well as several folding cameras.
From the mid-1930s it also made the Edinex 35mm viewfinder cameras. These are equipped with Wirgin Gewironar lens and Compur shutter or Steinheil Culminar lens (alike Tessar) with Prontor shutter.
In 1961 Wirgin bought Franka. Several 35mm viewfinder cameras had been made in the Franka-Kamerawerk in Bayreuth/Oberfranken, for example the one visible in the picture at the right side of this page, an Edixa with builtin selenium meter and a lens with selectors for shutter speed, aperture and distance.
Made in Bayreuth and Wiesbaden were the small Edixa cameras for 16mm film with built-in meter, all derived from an original model designed in Wiesbaden and developed and produced in Wiesbaden and Bayreuth as Edixa 16 and Franka 16.
Contents
35mm film
- Edinex series
- several Edina
- and Edixa models
SLR
- Edixa series
16mm film
- Edixa 16 series
127 film
- Gewirette
- Reporter
- Klein-Edinex
120 film
- Some sophisticated bellows cameras and several other folding cameras like the Rofika (=Rollfilmkamera)
- An export version of the Reflekta II TLR was sold in the USA under the Wirgin label. (see links)
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| The Wirgin Reporter |
Links
General links
In English:
- History of Wirgin (German version) by Klaus-Eckhard Riess in his camera site
In German:
- Wirgin.de website by Stefan Schaum - Holzappel
In French:
Miscellaneous
In English:
- German TLR cameras with two Wirgin Reflex at Barry Toogood's www.tlr-cameras.com
- Edixa SLR cameras in Andrey's M42 pages
- Other manuals at butkus.org's Orphan Cameras:
In German:
