Welta Reflekta1955

History

Welta-Werk had a long pre-war history as an independent camera manufacturer in Freital. After 1945, the factory was nationalised and absorbed into the East German VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb, or People's Own Enterprise) system. Production continued under state direction, with the company assigned to manufacture modestly specified cameras for the domestic market and for export to other Eastern Bloc countries.

The Reflekta was developed to give East German consumers and export markets access to a medium-format TLR without the cost of the better-specified West German models such as the Rolleicord or the Voigtlander Brilliant. The Meyer-Optik Meritar triplet, produced at the nearby Meyer-Optik Gorlitz works, was a natural choice: it was economical to manufacture and adequate for amateur use.

A successor, the Welta Reflekta II, followed with detail refinements. The original Reflekta is the more common find on the used market, largely because the Reflekta II saw more limited distribution.

Why It Matters

The Welta Reflekta is a representative example of mid-1950s East German camera production under the VEB system. It demonstrates the constraints and competencies of that industrial model: sound basic engineering, reliance on in-country optical suppliers such as Meyer-Optik, and an absence of the refinements -- better coatings, coupled rangefinders, metering -- that contemporary West German and Japanese manufacturers were incorporating.

The Meritar f/3.5 lens produces a characteristic rendering that some photographers find appealing: soft at wide apertures with increased sharpness and contrast when stopped down to f/8 or f/11. This quality has attracted a small following among film photographers interested in East German optics.

For camera historians, the Reflekta illustrates the bifurcation of the German camera industry after 1945. Welta-Werk, Carl Zeiss Jena, and Meyer-Optik Gorlitz all continued producing cameras and lenses in the East while their West German counterparts -- Rollei, Voigtlander, Schneider -- developed along a different commercial trajectory.

References

• Camera-Wiki: Welta Reflekta -- primary English-language reference for model identification and basic specifications.