Rangefinder Wheel is Hard to Operate, What is the Cause of This?įocusing Helical Seems to Have a Lot of Clearance, is This Normal? Difference Between a Black Dial and a Color Dial Camera?ĭial Camera be Converted to a Color Dial Camera? Important would be one number of a 1926 camera.įrom 1932 U.

If I go on the letters from 1918 (H) to 1932 (U) that would fit to approx 100000 cameras a year in average.Īs the Zeiss Ikon numbers after 1926 are higher, sowe sould have far less than 100000 Icas per year before 1926! I know a H50xxxx Palmos, so in 1918 they would have had at least 50000 cameras per year. Or they used any letter only for one year, but then there would be no high numbers. You fill up any letter to 100000 cameras, that woulf mean they would have had approx 100000 Cameras per Year, When I say 1913 was C (from my Palmos) and 1918 was H (Ideal), there woulf be two ways:

If we look at the numbering system, Letter xxxxx means, you can have 100000 Cameras per Letter max. Maybe there were 500000 Icas in sum, as a guess. From 1909-1926 Zeiss hat about 550000 lenses made, and there are a lot of non-Zeiss esp on the cheaper Icas.Ĭompur made 450000 shutters in this period of time. So I think the ICA production numbers are higher. And al ot of cameras had other shutters, IBSOR etc. But those cameras also will add to serial numbers. Indeed the Zeiss numbers are valuable as we the the number of lenses per year.īut I think the Zeiss lenese were for the better cmaeras, the huge numbers of primitive box cameras had simpl lenses. So your problem is that few of us on the Forums (here and APUG) will actually own an ICA camera, many of us will own pre WWII Zeiss Ikons because production increased dramatically in the 1930's. That's a rough average of 50,000 Zeiss lenses a year in that period and with many companies using their lenses so I guess that we can think in terms of 10,000 ICA camera a year probably less as they were smaller than Voigtlander. If we assume post WW! to the formation of Zeiss Ikon that Compur made approx 350,000 shutters, Zeiss 405,000 lenses, Voigtlander 100,000 (according to the serial numbers) we see things in a different perspective. Look at the number of lenses Voightlander made each year between the wars it's low until after the Nazi's came into power and the German economy grew. The German photographic industry was struggling after WWI with far too many companies competing for what little business there was. I think part of the problem is the number of cameras actually manufactured by the various German companies before WWII and then more importantly before the merger to form Zeiss Ikon, it's not high.Īs a number of companies used Zeiss lenses and we know from the Serial numbers roughly how many lenses were made each year it seems quite obvious the companies weren't making huge numbers of cameras, this is also corroborated by the number of shutters sold by Compur and many were exported.

Contax serial numbers