Roland Plasmat w. Box

The Roland Kleinbild-Kamera is a coupled rangefinder camera for 4.5×6 cm exposures on 120 film, made from 1931 onwards. McKeown gives its maker as Plasmat GmbH, a company belonging to Paul Rudoplh. It has an uncoated 70 mm f/2.7 Plasmat lens, designed by Dr Rudolph, mounted on a collapsing lens-tube. Focusing is by twisting a knurled collar at the body end of the lens; the camera focuses to about one metre. Paul Rudolph was a German scientist and optician. He was an employee of Carl Zeiss when he created the first anastigmatic lens which was introduced in 1889 as the Zeiss Anastigmat (later sold as the Protar). Rudolph also developed the Planar, a lens with near-flat focal plane, and the most-copied popular advanced still camera lens design Tessar. He retired early but was forced to re-enter business after losing his capital through inflation. In 1920 he was hired by Hugo Meyer where he finished his development of the highly color-corrected Plasmat lens which had a higher correction of spherical abberation than Goerz' famous Dagor. It was introduced as a convettible lens with lens speed 1:4.5; the cine lens versions like the Kino Plasmat 1:1,5/16 were the fastest lenses of the mid-1920s. In 1933 Plasmat company in Berlin launched the Roland small format rangefinder camera with Plasmat 1:2.7/70. In 1935 the company became the Kamerabau-Gesellschaft Rudolph & Co. The lens is convertible into an M-mount to be used on Digital M cameras (without RF coupling) but can be easily put back into the camera. Including the original extremely rare maker's box.