Rolleiflex 2.8B

The 2.8B replaced the 2.8A in February 1952 and was itself replaced within the year. en.wikipedia’s K-code table gives it the months February 1952 to March 1953 and marks it rare; antiquecameras.net, citing Prochnow, puts production at about 1,250 cameras, all for the United States, and attributes the small run to post-war supply problems with the lens. That lens is the Carl Zeiss Jena Biometar 80mm f/2.8, a five-element design from the East German half of the divided Zeiss, and the 2.8B is the only Rolleiflex ever fitted with it. The body is otherwise the 2.8A’s: Heidosmat f/2.8 viewing lens, Compur Rapid MX shutter running 1–1/500 s with M and X synchronisation, crank wind with the shutter cocked by the advance.

The Biometar did what the Tessar had not. antiquecameras.net says it performed much better than the 2.8A’s lens, but with so few made it stayed a niche product, and Franke & Heidecke hardly advertised it. The replacement was already in hand: the 2.8C with Schneider’s Xenotar launched in December 1952, three months before the last 2.8B, and ja.wikipedia’s serial list has the 2.8C’s block starting at 1260350, directly after the 2.8B’s 1204000–1260000. A block of 56,000 numbers for 1,250 cameras suggests the range was shared or largely unused, and nothing found here explains it.

What survives is a collector’s camera and a listing hazard. The Biometar engraving is the identity — a Jena lens on a West German camera, at the moment when Oberkochen and Jena were both calling themselves Zeiss — and the serial block should agree with it. Dealers quote the 1,250 figure and price accordingly, so a 2.8A Type 2 or an early 2.8C offered as a 2.8B is worth checking against both. No review of the 2.8B as a camera to use was found; the writers who have shot the 2.8 line start with the 2.8C.