This page describes the very first camera model I ever used, a Diaxette made by
Voss in Ulm. I must have received
it some time in 1963, but I didn't note it in my diary. The first photos I took with it
were in April 1964:
This camera differs in a number of ways from nearly all other cameras in my collection. It
is one of only two with a leaf shutter, fixed lens and no focus assistance whatsoever. It's
really a bare-bones camera: lens, aperture, shutter. About the only things that it has that
some of my others don't are flash sync and self-timer. And yet I took some good photos with
it in the 16 months I used it, including these photos that have been very popular:
It has a Pronto shutter with speeds of only 1/25, 1/50, 1/100 and
1/200, and a 45 mm f/2.8 Steinheil Cassar lens, one of the worst I know: it's only a triplet, and at full aperture it's very
soft in the corners:
Until I bought this camera, I used a photo by Cees-Jan de Hoog on my camera collection page:
And how about that, the (lens?) serial numbers are almost the same: 900139 and 900142,
though Cees-Jan's camera has a Prontor-S shutter with 1/300 s top shutter speed.
Lens serial numbers? Maybe they're the camera serial number, which is pretty much the same
for a fixed-lens camera. Certainly I can't find any other serial number on the camera.
