Praktica

Praktica was a brand of camera manufactured by Pentacon in Dresden in eastern Germany, within the GDR between 1949 and the German reunification in 1990. The firm Pentacon was divided in mainly two parts and sold after German reunification. Schneider Kreuznach and Noble bought parts of it. Pentacon is a Dresden-based company in the optical and precision engineering industry, which was at times a major manufacturer of photo cameras. The name Pentacon is derived on the one hand from the Contax brand of the Dresden Zeiss Ikon Kamerawerke and Pentagon (Greek for pentagon), because a pentaprism for SLR cameras developed for the first time in Dresden has this shape in cross section. Today's PENTACON GmbH Foto- und Feinwerktechnik is still based in Dresden. It is part of the Schneider Group, Bad Kreuznach. Pentacon is the modern-day successor to Dresden camera firms such as Zeiss Ikon; for many years Dresden was the world's largest producer of cameras. Previous brands of the predecessor firms included Praktica, Exa, Pentacon, Zeiss Ikon, Contax (now owned by the Carl Zeiss company), Ica, Ernemann, Exakta, Praktiflex, and many more. Among the innovative legacies of the predecessor firms are the roll film SLR camera in 1933, the 35mm SLR in 1936, and the pentaprism SLR in 1949. After WWII the company's products were best known in the Eastern Bloc countries, though some were exported to the west. They currently produce both budget lenses (mostly small, not very durable, and having manual focus, but good in optical quality) and higher priced products. They also produce optical equipment for the space programs of the US, Western Europe, and Russia. In 2001, the production of Praktica Analogue SLR cameras was discontinued with the focus shifting to a range of Praktica digital compact cameras and camcorders together with an extensive range...