The second miniature revolution

[Roland Zwiers]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

After 1940 the relative contributions of the original standard bearers (Leica, Rolleiflex, Kine Exakta) started to diminish.

As soon as the second miniature revolution was becoming mainstream itself, there were dozens of imitators and new innovators that made sure that the standards set by the Leica, the Rolleiflex and the Kine Exakta would become ever more dominant.

In the next slide I will present a 1960 review of the Rolleiflex.
In that year this camera could be imported again in the UK without import restrictions.
For the first time since August 1939!

[Roland Zwiers]

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

[Roland Zwiers]

This 1960 reviewer speaks of ‘the complete stampede to 35mm’.

This suggests that by 1960 35mm cameras were already becoming the dominant type of miniature camera.
By then this was not because of the dominant share of the Leica.
With or without the Leica, the stampede to the 35mm format would simply have continued.
The momentum was even increasingly towards the 35mm SLR camera with interchangeable lenses (in fact Kine Exakta copies).
Even Leitz would move in this direction.

In 1960 the 6x6 format was still very much alive.
The reviewer attributes this to the popularity of the Rolleiflex and its many copies.
But by 1960 the 6x6 branch of the miniature revolution was increasingly supported by innovative competitors (Hasselblad, Super Ikonta) and numerous 6x6 folding cameras.

So, from this point of view, it is immaterial how long the original standard bearers (Leica, Rolleiflex, Kine Exakta) would continue to flourish after 1940, 1945 or 1960.
The rest of the world had already jumped on the bandwagon.  
And the direction of the bandwagon was no longer determined by the original innovators.

Of course, we must be proud and grateful that the Leica is still in production today.
This also has commercial significance, comparable with the prestige that is due to vintage cars and watches.
But when analysing historical developments, I would say this 2025 point of view has little added value.

To be continued.

Roland

[willeica]

2 hours ago, Roland Zwiers said:

It is indeed proper to mark March 1925 as the start of the second miniature revolution

We could also say June 1924, but a lot of this is with the benefit of hindsight. The site which I have linked shows about 43 different 35mm cameras being developed around the same time that the Leica was being developed. Only the Leica thrived and survived, because of the genius of Barnack in creating a 'sustainable' camera.

There were many revolutions before that with the 'Kodak' one perhaps the most significant, particularly as it marked the beginning of the migration from plates to film. 

An illustration of this

This is a crop from a photograph of Augusta Crofton Dillon in 1865 using her giant plate camera.

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

 

This is a photograph of Augusta Crofton Dillon (centre) with her 3 daughters c 1900 using the latest box cameras and her son has a Kodak No 4 Folding Camera. Behind them is the large 'Photography House' built in the 1860s to enable Augusta to do her wet plate photography where the plates had to be developed within about 15 minutes after exposure. Miniaturisation had started in the late 19th Century

William 

 

[Roland Zwiers]

After 1940 the relative contributions of the original standard bearers (Leica, Rolleiflex, Kine Exakta) started to diminish.

As soon as the second miniature revolution was becoming mainstream itself, there were dozens of imitators and new innovators that made sure that the standards set by the Leica, the Rolleiflex and the Kine Exakta would become ever more dominant.

In the next slide I will present a 1960 review of the Rolleiflex.
In that year this camera could be imported again in the UK without import restrictions.
For the first time since August 1939!

[Roland Zwiers]

"Miniaturisation had started in the late 19th Century"

William,

Indeed!
That is what I call the first miniature revolution with the three pillars:

• the French miniaturer cameras for plates (4,5x6cm) and stereo plates (two 4x4cm negatives on 4,5x10,7 plates)
• the Kodak roll film cameras
• the 35mm cine cameras with 'still' photography on individual 18x24mm frames 

In 1902-1910, while working for Zeiss Palmos and ICA, Oskar Barnack was in the middle of this first miniature revolution.
In post-1950 Leica literature this is underexposed.
There is even the suggestion that Oskar Barnack invented the concept 'small negative, big print' in 1905 during a walk in the Thuringer Forest.
I discuss this more fully in a separate article.

So I am happy that you agree with me that the second miniature revolution,
beginning with the Leica I in March 1925,
builds on the first miniature revolution that started already in the late 19th century.

I know from experience that several Leica historians do not readily agree with me on these points.

Roland 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[willeica]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

2 hours ago, Roland Zwiers said:

"Miniaturisation had started in the late 19th Century"

William,

Indeed!
That is what I call the first miniature revolution with the three pillars:

• the French miniaturer cameras for plates (4,5x6cm) and stereo plates (two 4x4cm negatives on 4,5x10,7 plates)
• the Kodak roll film cameras
• the 35mm cine cameras with 'still' photography on individual 18x24mm frames 

In 1902-1910, while working for Zeiss Palmos and ICA, Oskar Barnack was in the middle of this first miniature revolution.
In post-1950 Leica literature this is underexposed.
There is even the suggestion that Oskar Barnack invented the concept 'small negative, big print' in 1905 during a walk in the Thuringer Forest.
I discuss this more fully in a separate article.

So I am happy that you agree with me that the second miniature revolution,
beginning with the Leica I in March 1925,
builds on the first miniature revolution that started already in the late 19th century.

I know from experience that several Leica historians do not readily agree with me on these points.

Roland 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One big question is how familiar was Barnack with the over 40 other attempts to create a 35mm stills camera in the same period that he was attempting to perfect his concept. It always astonishes me how much people knew about other developments 'back then' as, indeed, it was in my own adult life from the late 1960s up to the 'noughties'.  i.e. the pre-internet period We think we know a lot more now, but we knew a lot 'back then'. 

William 

[Roland Zwiers]

William,

Oskar Barnack was familiar with a prototype Minigraph camera for perforated 35mm cine negative film.
He mentions this Minigraph camera himself in his 1931 contribution in Die Leica.
According to a colleague of Oskar Barnack during his Zeiss Palmos period (so during 1902-1909), Oskar Barnack even tested a 3.5/50 Kino Tessar on a (prototype) Minigraph.
This colleague observes that the Minigraph camera convinced Oskar Barnack of the merits of perforated 35mm cine negative flm,  if only the negative size would double to 24x36mm.

Ulf Richter (2009) mentions this source, but does not mention the direct link between the Minigraph and the (Ur)Leica.

Roland

 

[willeica]

7 hours ago, Roland Zwiers said:

William,

Oskar Barnack was familiar with a prototype Minigraph camera for perforated 35mm cine negative film.
He mentions this Minigraph camera himself in his 1931 contribution in Die Leica.
According to a colleague of Oskar Barnack during his Zeiss Palmos period (so during 1902-1909), Oskar Barnack even tested a 3.5/50 Kino Tessar on a (prototype) Minigraph.
This colleague observes that the Minigraph camera convinced Oskar Barnack of the merits of perforated 35mm cine negative flm,  if only the negative size would double to 24x36mm.

Ulf Richter (2009) mentions this source, but does not mention the direct link between the Minigraph and the (Ur)Leica.

Roland

 

I think you need to look at a number of cameras on that 43 camera list. Barnack was an engineering genius and he got his design right and then developed it very well over a 20 year period, by which time he was nearly about to leave us. However, if something he used appears on that list that does not mean that he was copying other designs. He and other engineers may have reached the same conclusions. One interesting feature is the variety of frame sizes for 35mm on that list.

I'm now going to say something that you may consider to be controversial, but, based on what I can see, 35mm did not become really dominant until the 1950s and, in the case of professional use, not until the 1960s. Most prewar cameras used some form of roll film and, in the case of professionals, medium and large format dominated.

My question is, by when had this second miniature revolution actually finished?

William

 

 

[sandro]

Interesting suggestion, William, although I am not sure if I agree. For professional use, I think we need to distinguish between different types of photography. Photojournalists tended to use 35mm cameras because they had to work quickly and needed equipment that was relatively easy to carry around. For other types of professional photography, roll film did indeed remain in use for longer, especially with the Rolleiflex, Zenza Bronica and others.
However, from around 1950 onwards, camera manufacturers focused primarily on developing 35mm cameras, while simpler roll film cameras continued to be produced for amateur use for a long time.

Lex

[pgk]

13 hours ago, willeica said:

My question is, by when had this second miniature revolution actually finished?

William

I'm not sure it did/has William. We often see the rise of some aspects of a technology often alongside the decline of other aspects. You could say that even today this is happening as we are witnessing the increasing dominance of EVF cameras, as they become more the norm, and at the same time we are seeing the decline of the SLR as the dominant camera type. But we are also seeing a variety of formats including smaller than 35mm (36x24mm = FX) being used, and if we add in 'phones the dominant format in use today is probably much smaller than that in any in purpose built cameras.

FWIW a relatively small format was already in use by the 1850s - 3" x 3" stereo format - and was already being 'enlarged', upon viewing anyway, by the use of stereo viewers. It was limited by both lens and photographic material technology, but such stereo photographs were by no means bad. Whilst the 35mm format was undoubtedly made into an effective one by the introduction of the Leica, it could be argued that it had to sit alongside larger formats for a very long time indeed, and perhaps even up until the introduction of high resolution digital sensors in the 2000s, simply because it could not always deliver results required for many applications.

Whether one can genuinely describe high points in the evolutionary process of photography as 'revolutions' is something that we might well have a long discussion about. Perhaps the introduction of the Leica could be better referred to as a pivotal evolutionary shift because it undoubtedly represents a point at which the introduction of a technologically viable design started a shift in the evolution of photography, and one which persists up to the present day. Was it truly 'revolutionary'? I'm not sure/dubious but see no reason to consider it anything other than an extraordinary achievement, and one which led to a revision in the way camera design move forward. Prior designs did not have the scale of impact of the Leica, so the introduction of the first Leica was perhaps a watershed or pivotal moment in photographic technology and was possible due to numerous 'evolutionary' aspects of the multitude of technical requirements which enabled it to be built and, most importantly, be an effective photographic tool.

[willeica]

2 hours ago, pgk said:

I'm not sure it did/has William

My question is rhetorical and, in truth, I don't know the answer myself. There has been constant development of cameras since the Daguerreotype of 1839 and these days we often talk about 'imaging' rather than photography.  Indeed, the concept of a device called a 'camera' being essential as an imaging device may end quite soon. Academics talk about the 'digital turn' as opposed to the 'digital revolution', so what we are trying to describe are probably turns in the road rather than revolutions. The concept of a 'miniature camera' came into vogue in the 1920s around the time that the Leica and other smaller cameras appeared, but tiny metal cameras had been around for 20 to 30 years by that time with the Kemper Kombi and the Houghton Ticka etc . Then there were the sub-miniature cameras, often sold at the seaside.  There was at one time a magazine for serious amateurs in the UK called 'The Miniature Camera', which was launched in 1936. Such a magazine would be pointless today as smartphone cameras are today's 'miniature cameras', through which photography has become truly global and democratic, but not without some social, political and economic consequences. 

There are probably a number of lasting contributions which Barnack made

- The frame size, but others were hovering around the same 'pedal point' at around the same time

- The system camera - something which is often overlooked

- The small negative, large print concept, which required a lot of processing and other equipment issues to be resolved, although this issue was not unique to Leitz/Leica

- The wind on/shutter cock concept

- The integrated rangefinder-  although others had also tried out this concept, but Barnack's version was very compact and worked very well.

Of course, the revolution was not and will not be televised!

I'll leave it at that. 

William  

[Roland Zwiers]

William, Paul, Lex,

Contemporary observers from the 1930s did regard the Leica I and the Rolleiflex as revolutionary.
But the Leica and the Rolleiflex did not initiate the trend towards miniaturisation.
So I consider March 1925 the watershed between the first and the second miniature revolution.

This second miniature revolution was carried in terms of film formats by the Leica (35mm film) and the Rolleiflex (6x6).
The Kine Exakta of 1936 added a third archetype camera.
So in my analyses these three cameras are the backbone for the hardware part of the second miniature revolution.

When did this second miniature revolution end?
I would say the hardware and software challenges were largely met by 1940.
By then professional photographers could use either a 35mm camera or a 6x6 camera.

One must distinguish between the end of the revolution (mission accomplished) and achieving a dominant market share.
By 1940 the revolution was won in the sense that 35mm and 6x6 were not regarded anymore as a temporary craze.
Miniature cameras had proven their value and were about to become mainstream themselves.

When was the turning point that 35mm and 6x6 combined became dominant/ mainstream?
I would say by the early 1950s.
Reviews in Amateur Photographer show that the majority of the new cameras on the British market were either for 35mm film or for the 6x6 format.
New 6x9 cameras are concentrated in the cheap box/ folding camera category.
Other formats (especially 127-film) are on the way out.
Many 127-cameras are cheap box cameras as well.

When would 35mm overtake the 6x6 format?
Here I am not able to give a good estimate.
My guess would be some time after 1960.
But this not the period that I am concentrating on now.

Roland

 

   

 

 

 

by 1940 many photographers would still use 6x9 cameras.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[pgk]

Perhaps it is pertinent to suggest that cost, not of the camera but of film, processing, chemicals and paper, would have been a significant contributory factor for popularising smaller formats. Large format film and plates and processing were never particularly cheap and reducing taking costs with 35mm film and processing would certainly have appealed to the mass amateur market, though possibly less to the professional one. Well heeled amateurs would have had more disposable income to then spend on fine hardware such as Leicas.

The pro market has always been an oddity in as much as 'professional' cameras have been coveted as being robust and capable. Professionals probably moved into 35mm after the format was well established in the amateur market. Its fascinating to view adverts in old photographic magazines which are actually highly informative of what photographers bought and so how the photographic world of their time thought.

Both William and I have undertaken extensive research into earlier equipment and what is also fascinating is that questions of ease of use, quality and so on have been asked since the birth of photography, just as they are today.

As an aside but based on all this, I wonder where photography wuld be today without the advent of any digital sensors? Would the Leica have seen a resurgence or would it have suffered from lacking competitiveness in terms of versatility? Would the SLR have evolved? Intriguing.

[willeica]

15 hours ago, Roland Zwiers said:

William, Paul, Lex,

Contemporary observers from the 1930s did regard the Leica I and the Rolleiflex as revolutionary.
But the Leica and the Rolleiflex did not initiate the trend towards miniaturisation.
So I consider March 1925 the watershed between the first and the second miniature revolution.

This second miniature revolution was carried in terms of film formats by the Leica (35mm film) and the Rolleiflex (6x6).
The Kine Exakta of 1936 added a third archetype camera.
So in my analyses these three cameras are the backbone for the hardware part of the second miniature revolution.

When did this second miniature revolution end?
I would say the hardware and software challenges were largely met by 1940.
By then professional photographers could use either a 35mm camera or a 6x6 camera.

One must distinguish between the end of the revolution (mission accomplished) and achieving a dominant market share.
By 1940 the revolution was won in the sense that 35mm and 6x6 were not regarded anymore as a temporary craze.
Miniature cameras had proven their value and were about to become mainstream themselves.

When was the turning point that 35mm and 6x6 combined became dominant/ mainstream?
I would say by the early 1950s.
Reviews in Amateur Photographer show that the majority of the new cameras on the British market were either for 35mm film or for the 6x6 format.
New 6x9 cameras are concentrated in the cheap box/ folding camera category.
Other formats (especially 127-film) are on the way out.
Many 127-cameras are cheap box cameras as well.

When would 35mm overtake the 6x6 format?
Here I am not able to give a good estimate.
My guess would be some time after 1960.
But this not the period that I am concentrating on now.

Roland

 

   

 

 

 

by 1940 many photographers would still use 6x9 cameras.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are going to talk about a 'miniature revolution' you should define what it was and how it could be observed. Your dates above more or less agree with mine. The 35mm 'revolution' was a 'slow burn' and it took at least 30 years to truly get off the ground . In the 1930s in Germany the dominant form of camera was a folder with a Deckel or Gauthier leaf shutter using roll film. I did an extensive Zoom presentation for PCCGB on this maybe 3 years ago, but, unfortunately, this did not appear on Zoom. I still have the slides for this, of course, which show a peak in the sales of those shutters in the late 1930s/early 1940s followed by a slow decline in the 1950s. Of course there were 35mm cameras which were folding with leaf shutters and 35mm, such as the early Retinas. One of the main advantages of the focal plane shutter was the ease with which it allowed interchangeable lenses. My Zoom talk about early Leicas with British interchangeable lenses is on YouTube and it has also appeared in print. In that I went into how Leitz followed the lead of the British techs to produce 'kit cameras' in the early 1930s. If you were to take a Leica II Model D kit in a case from 1932 and a digital enthusiast camera kit of 2025, the main differences are electronics and automation (also screw mount v bayonet). 

In truth, many of today's enthusiast digital cameras rely on features which could be deemed to be 'technologically archaic', particularly the image format and the interchangeable system lenses. Over the past 30 years or so we have heard a lot of babble about things like 'full frame' and 'mirrorless' come and go. Indeed in the case of the latter we should perhaps start identifying certain cameras as being 'with mirror' rather than identifying the majority as being 'mirrorless'. The interchangeable lens thing is perhaps interesting as it remains a massive money spinner for the manufacturers of cameras and lenses. That has its origins in what you might describe as the 'second miniature revolution'. 

I do believe that you need to throw your net wider than the Leica, the Rolleiflex and the Exakta, though, to get the bigger picture, such as looking at the cameras produced by the film manufacturers such as Kodak and Agfa. You might also look at the plate v film interchange which was an important part of so-called 'miniaturisation'. Many professionals were still using plates for particular types of work in the early 1950s. 

15 hours ago, pgk said:

 

Both William and I have undertaken extensive research into earlier equipment and what is also fascinating is that questions of ease of use, quality and so on have been asked since the birth of photography, just as they are today.

As an aside but based on all this, I wonder where photography wuld be today without the advent of any digital sensors? Would the Leica have seen a resurgence or would it have suffered from lacking competitiveness in terms of versatility? Would the SLR have evolved? Intriguing.

Although Leica was slow to get to digital and the M8 was clunky- I recall using one kind of SD card like a starting handle in mine before I could use a regular SD card- the migration to digital was the saving of Leica and now the company is more successful than it ever has been before. Indeed so long as the effects of the 'second miniature revolution' hold sway, the company is assured of a bright future. How long is that 'so long', though?

William 

[pgk]

59 minutes ago, willeica said:

Many professionals were still using plates for particular types of work in the early 1950s.

And amateurs too. I have some small (less than 6x6cm) glass plates taken by my father-in-law in the early 1950s, of yachting, places and family. He was a 'record' photographer or 'snapshotter' rather than someone with an absolute interest in photography and his cameras were never particularly sophisticated. Results were of varying 'quality', but this underscores that certainly glass plates were still being used back then.

[willeica]

4 hours ago, pgk said:

And amateurs too. I have some small (less than 6x6cm) glass plates taken by my father-in-law in the early 1950s, of yachting, places and family. He was a 'record' photographer or 'snapshotter' rather than someone with an absolute interest in photography and his cameras were never particularly sophisticated. Results were of varying 'quality', but this underscores that certainly glass plates were still being used back then.

I have some plates done by amateurs in the 1950s, but, by then, they were the exception. One aspect I would like to see examined is the extent to which the film manufacturers attempted to control the camera market with film formats etc This continued almost until the dawn of digital with APS. Kodak, in particular, attempted to use film formats and obsolescence to create markets for cameras, many of which might be regarded as 'miniature'. Their gambits often failed, particularly later on when they missed the boat on digital. Attempting to create an end to end monopoly often ends up in disaster. Likewise for Zeiss who had effective control of both Deckel and Gauthier's competing shutters, which lost a lot of market share when the focal plane 35mm models came along in the late 1950s. To be fair, Leitz never attempted to create a monopoly. In fact the company never, to my knowledge, took copyright actions against the many imitators of its LTM cameras. 

William 

[lmans]

On 8/29/2025 at 7:48 AM, willeica said:

One big question is how familiar was Barnack with the over 40 other attempts to create a 35mm stills camera in the same period that he was attempting to perfect his concept. It always astonishes me how much people knew about other developments 'back then' as, indeed, it was in my own adult life from the late 1960s up to the 'noughties'.  i.e. the pre-internet period We think we know a lot more now, but we knew a lot 'back then'. 

William 

this is true.... just look at the Wright brothers and flight. Most people just assume that the Wrights created flight but really there was a lot of flight attempts going on during the same time as the Wrights. But they improved upon that 'then knowledge'... The same with Barnack.    great point! 

[Roland Zwiers]

1956: Market share of 35mm and 6x6 cameras compared to the rest of the market

There are so many interesting comments and this week I only have a few hours time to respond.

In terms of the development of the second miniature revolution after 1940 it is important to avoid the pitfalls of a 2025 perspective.

In my analysis the second miniature was based on two formats:
The 24x36mm size on 35mm film as introduced by the Leica in 1925.
And the 6x6 size as introduced by the Rolleiflex in 1929 (117-film for six exposures of 6x6) and 1932 (120-film for 12 exposures of 6x6).
In contemporary literature one can see that these two standards increasingly dominate the miniature space.
In contemporary literature one can also see that the second miniature revolution was succesful around 1939-1940.

Success for the Leica was more difficult than for the Rolleiflex, simply because of the much smaller negative size.
E.g. when around 1936 the film industry opted for double-layer film, his was disastrous for (professional)  Leica photography.
The double layer allowed for a much bigger exposure latitude, but this came at the cost of sharp enlargements.
Simply because of the very thick emulsion.
This 35mm crisis was only solved when film producers re-introduced single layer films with thin emulsions.

So by 1939-1940 photography on 35mm film was in stable water again.
For the 6x6 format the double-layer problem of 1936 had not been so disastrous because of the bigger negative size.

This does not mean that by 1940 the formats 24x36mm and 6x6cm were already dominant or mainstream.
That would still take some time. 
One has to remember that 6x9cm was the dominant format in the 1920s and early 1930s.
These cameras would not have been retired immediately.
But one would expect that new cameras would increasingly be produced for the 24x36mm and 6x6 cm formats at the expense of new 6x9 cameras.

In the next slide I will paste the observation of a British editor in 1956.
It concerns the relative market share of 35mm cameras and 6x6 cameras combined as compared to the rest of the market.
 

 

 

 

 

 

[Advertisement]

Hallo,

Look here: Interesting Leica gear

[Roland Zwiers]

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!