KW Praktica B2001979

History

VEB Pentacon in Dresden had manufactured M42-mount cameras under the Praktica name since the early 1950s, building on the universal screwmount that Zeiss Ikon had popularised and that Pentax had carried to global dominance. By the late 1970s, the Japanese manufacturers had moved to electronic bayonet mounts - Canon's FD, Pentax's K-mount, Olympus OM - enabling open-aperture metering and more sophisticated automation. M42, as a passive mechanical mount, could not support these advances without stop-down metering.

Pentacon's answer was the B mount, introduced with the B200 in 1979. The B mount is a bayonet with electrical contacts that transmit the selected aperture value electronically from lens to body, permitting open-aperture metering. The lens aperture is controlled by a lever actuated by the camera body at the moment of exposure. This allowed the B200 to offer a genuinely modern autoexposure experience comparable to Western cameras of the period - without requiring the photographer to stop down the aperture ring before each shot.

The B200 was produced through the early 1980s and gave way to a series of successors including the B100 (a simpler, lower-cost variant), the BC1 (1985), and the BX20 (1986). The B mount itself outlasted the B200 by well over a decade, remaining the standard for Praktica SLRs until camera production in Dresden effectively ceased in the mid-1990s.

Why It Matters

The B200 is historically significant as the camera that initiated East Germany's most ambitious attempt to keep pace with the West in SLR design. The Praktica B mount represented a genuine engineering commitment - designing and manufacturing a new electronic bayonet system under the resource and information constraints of the GDR in the late 1970s was no small achievement.

For contemporary film photographers, the B200's significance is primarily as the entry point to the Praktica B lens ecosystem. The Carl Zeiss Jena B-mount lenses - particularly the Pancolar 50mm f/1.8 MC, Flektogon 35mm f/2.4 MC, and Sonnar 135mm f/2.8 MC - are optically excellent and considerably undervalued relative to equivalent Contax or Leica R glass. The B200 provides access to these lenses in their native automatic mount configuration.

The B200 also occupies a specific place in the history of electronic SLR design: it arrived the same year as the Olympus OM-2n and predates the Canon A-1's aperture-priority mode by only two years, placing Pentacon in reasonable synchrony with Japanese development timelines despite operating under very different industrial conditions.

Lenses & Accessories

Praktica B-mount electronic bayonet. Key native lenses:

• Carl Zeiss Jena Pancolar 50mm f/1.8 MC - standard lens, high contrast, excellent centre sharpness
• Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm f/2.4 MC - wide-angle, well-regarded for close-focus capability
• Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 135mm f/2.8 MC - portrait telephoto with smooth rendering
• Carl Zeiss Jena Vario-Pancolar 35-70mm f/4 MC - standard zoom
• Carl Zeiss Jena Aus Jena 28mm f/2.8 MC - wide-angle

M42 lenses can be adapted via B-mount to M42 adaptor but lose automatic aperture coupling, reverting to stop-down metering. This is a functional workaround that makes the B200 compatible with the enormous M42 lens library.

TTL flash via the B-mount hotshoe. Compatible with Metz 45 series with appropriate SCA adaptor, and Pentacon/Praktica-branded TTL units.

References

• Camera-Wiki: Praktica B200 - B-mount system history and specifications