Interesting Aka Relle exchangeable lens camera

The Aka Relle is an interesting, exchangeable lens camera with a simple viewfinder for composition and scale focusing. It was made in Germany in the mid to late 1950s and features a rather odd ‘clamshell’ construction.

My Aka Relle Camera

This was a eBay purchase which I made simply because it was a bit different from the run-of-the-mill 35 mm cameras which are common. It looked an interesting camera, although very worn, and since it was cheap I placed a bid and won it.

When it arrived a few days after the end of the auction I found that it is in fact very worn with the chrome plating worn through on several surfaces, but the only mechanical issue seems to be with the self-timer which is completely frozen. Fortunately, the design of the shutter means that if the self-timer is not selected the camera works without a problem, although at some point I’ll get the timer out and clean it, which will almost certainly fix it.

The other problem with the camera is a self-inflicted one – the film advance lever was very loose, so I removed the top by unscrewing it and lifted the lever off the camera. With the lever off the camera I found there is a spring which needs to be fitted to act as the return mechanism once the film is advanced, and although I can see how it is fitted, I can’t work out how I tension it as I fit it. I suspect I’ll work it out some time, but at the moment it eludes me.

Pictures of the Ada Relle Camera

Aka Relle Description

As I said above, this is a viewfinder camera with an interchangeable lens and composition markings in the viewfinder for 50, 75 & 90 mm lenses.

The construction of the camera is somewhat odd because it has a sort of clamshell case which splits down the middle of the camera and hinges open, revealing the camera inner chassis. This means the camera is very easy to load because there is plenty of room to fit the film, but the biggest advantage is there is no need for felt light traps because the case fully encloses the film chamber and the light seals are just moulded into the back case.

The lens mount is screw on type, but the lens isn’t threaded in the conventional sense. There is an outer ring around the lens which screws onto a threaded ring on the camera.

The lens itself has a locating gap milled out of its inner ring, and this mates with a peg on the camera’s lens mount. Once the lens is in place, the outer ring is tightened up and the lens is locked in place; It’s a bit like the mount used on the Pentacon Six. One advantage I can think of is the lens is located and positioned properly before the threaded ring is turned, so there is less chance of the lens not being properly located.

The lens itself is a Schneider-Krauznach Xenar 50 mm f/3.5 which should perform pretty well. I tried a lens of a similar type on my Ricoh GXR a while ago and got quite good results, and I would expect this variant to perform similarly.

The camera has a Prontor SVS shutter, which is one of the better shutters and offers a fairly standard set of speeds for a camera of this age – 1 sec to 1/300 sec + B with flash sync for electronic flash or bulbs. Although that seems a pitifully small range of shutter speeds to modern photographers, the speed of films available when this camera was made would have dictated quite slow speeds by today’s standard.

In fact, this camera has a film type reminder built into the film rewind crank, and the film types on offer were 10, 12, 14, 17, 21, 23 Din and Col Rev or Col Neg. The Din number refers to the speed of the film using a logarithmic scale and 23 Din is about 160 ISO, so you can see that film speeds were pretty slow in the mid 1950s.

The construction seems quite solid – the condition of my example suggests that it has seen a lot of action over the last 60 years and although it looks quite battered, apart from the self-timer everything else seems in pretty good order. Perhaps I’ll put a roll of FP4 through it and see how that Schneider-Krauznach lens performs!

Aka Relle Specifications

• Aka Relle 35 mm viewfinder camera
• Exchangeable lens with screw mount / clam design
• Prontor SVS shutter
• 1 sec to 1/300sec + bulb
• Flash sync socket
• Accessory socket
• Frame counter
• Film Type reminder
• Schneider-Krauznach 50mm f/3.5 lens
• Clamshell case design means no felt light seals
• Viewfinder markings for 50, 75 & 90 mm lenses
• Self-timer
• Tripod bush
• Serial No: 28552