Rolleiflex 2.8A

The 2.8A is the camera with which Franke & Heidecke tried to add a stop to the Rolleiflex and got it wrong. The Automat of 1937 had settled the body — crank wind, automatic frame counting, the shutter cocked by the advance — and the post-war Automat carried a 75mm f/3.5 Tessar or Xenar. In December 1949, by en.wikipedia’s K-code table, the firm put a Zeiss-Opton Tessar 80mm f/2.8 behind a Heidosmat f/2.8 viewing lens, in a Compur Rapid shutter that ran 1–1/400 s with a single X flash contact. antiquecameras.net, citing Prochnow, puts the run at about 9,870 cameras and says the model was sold only in the United States.

The lens is the story. The Tessar is a four-element design, and antiquecameras.net describes the 2.8A’s as pre-war manufacture; the same page says it was poorly received and often called soft at full aperture, and carries from rollei.org.uk the claim that about half the cameras came back in a recall for faulty lens construction — a figure found nowhere else. A photrio.com thread surfaced by search adds a collectors’ recollection that part of the first batch had Carl Zeiss Jena rather than Oberkochen Tessars, a third of them defective; nothing fetched here supports it, and the engraving on a given camera is the only test. Whatever the cause, the Tessar at f/2.8 is why the next two models exist: the 2.8B of 1952 went to the five-element Zeiss Jena Biometar, and the 2.8C to the Schneider Xenotar and, later, the Zeiss Planar.

Two runs are distinguished. The first, December 1949 to February 1951, has the Compur Rapid with 1/400 top speed; the second, April to August 1951, has the Compur Rapid MX with 1/500 and both M and X synchronisation, and ja.wikipedia gives it a separate serial block, 1201000–1203999, after the 1101000–1139999 of the first. Collectors on photrio split the production as roughly 7,870 and 2,000, numbers that add to Prochnow’s total but have no published table behind them. The 2.8A is not a camera to buy for its pictures — every reviewer of the later 2.8 models who mentions it does so as the one to avoid — but as the first f/2.8 Rolleiflex and the rarest of the three short-lived early 2.8 bodies after the 2.8B it is a collector’s model, identified by the one thing no other Rolleiflex has: an 80mm Tessar.