Royer Savoyflex1957

History

Royer was established in Toulouse in the postwar period, producing folding cameras that competed in the lower-to-mid tier of the French market. The company's most common products were folding 35mm cameras carrying Berthiot or Angénieux lenses. The Savoyflex represented a departure into SLR territory, introduced around 1957 as Japanese and German SLR cameras were beginning to define the serious amateur camera market.

The leaf-shutter SLR configuration was a European approach to the SLR format that was distinct from the Japanese focal-plane designs then emerging from Canon, Nikon, and Miranda. Several European manufacturers - Zeiss Ikon with the Contaflex, Voigtlander with the Bessamatic, Kodak with the Retina Reflex - pursued the same hybrid design in this period. Royer's entry into this category was smaller in scale and shorter-lived than those competitors.

The exact production end date for the Savoyflex is not well documented in available sources.

Why It Matters

The Savoyflex is historically interesting as evidence of the breadth of the European SLR experiment in the late 1950s. The leaf-shutter SLR was a technically coherent alternative to the focal-plane SLR: it preserved flash synchronisation at all shutter speeds, which was a meaningful practical advantage in studio and event photography before electronic flash became inexpensive. The fact that a relatively modest manufacturer like Royer produced an SLR at all reflects the degree to which SLR design had become aspirational for camera makers of this era.

The Som Berthiot lens fitted to the Savoyflex shares the optical character of Berthiot glass found on other French cameras: moderate resolution, distinctive rendering at wider apertures, and a quality that differs from the sharper, higher-contrast Zeiss or Nikkor alternatives. This makes the camera of interest to photographers who appreciate the aesthetic of French postwar optics.

Sample Photographers / Notable Use

• Used by French amateur and semi-professional photographers in the late 1950s as a domestically manufactured SLR alternative to German and Japanese imports.
• Collected today primarily by enthusiasts of French camera manufacturing history and by researchers of the leaf-shutter SLR category.

References

• Camera-Wiki: Royer - general overview of the Royer manufacturer and camera range