Rollei 35

The Rollei 35 is a 35mm miniature viewfinder camera built by Rollei. The original Rollei 35, when introduced at photokina in 1966, was the smallest existing 135 film camera. The Rollei 35 series remains one of the smallest 35 mm cameras after the Minolta TC-1 and Minox 35. In 30 years, about 2 million Rollei 35 series cameras were manufactured. The Rollei 35 was manufactured by DHW Fototechnik up to 2015, the successor of Franke & Heidecke as small-batch production. The last version is the Rollei 35 Classic, an updated Rollei 35 SE.

In about 1960, when the first subminiature cameras for 16 mm film came to market, Heinz Waaske, chief engineer of German camera maker Wirgin, proposed that the purchasers of the 16 mm subminiature cameras, or even the half-frame Olympus Pen 35 mm cameras, were motivated not by the tiny film format but the size of the cameras. After having already engineered and designed the 16 mm Wirgin Edixa 16 as well as 35 mm single-lens-reflex cameras, he now set out to build a 35 mm camera in a housing only one third of the volume of the viewfinder cameras of the time.

In his spare time, working in his own living room, Waaske made the first technical drawings of the camera in 1962, with prototypes made by Wirgin.

The three-element 40 mm f3.5 Cassar lens was sourced from Steinheil ().

Housed within a sliding tube, the lens retracts into the camera body when not in use.

Because of the limited radius of available space around the fully insertable lens, the use of the normal central shutter was impossible. Therefore, Waaske proposed a new type of shutter, which was separated into two functional parts. The shutter controlling clockworks were mounted unmovable in the camera body, while the shutter lamellas were mounted in the movable sliding tube. The separate parts were mechanically coupled by shafts. Only when the shutter was cocked and therefore the lamellas were uncoupled, the sliding tube could be inserted into the housing.

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