Agfa Parat-I

A fully manual 35mm half-frame model that dates from the 1960s

- Tony Kemplen on the ...

A GFA will be a name familiar to older photographers, being associated not just with cameras, but with film, paper and other darkroom supplies and equipment. One of its products is Rodinal, which is the only film developer I use these days, and dates back to 1888.

The name, which first appeared in 1867, is an abbreviation for the German company Aktien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation. A simple box camera was the first to bear the name in 1930, and over the years the firm's output was prodigious, with dozens of models in various formats released under the brand. In common with many German companies, the Second World War resulted in the fragmentation of AGFA, and eventually after various mergers and takeovers, the firm last made film cameras in 1983. The brand name lingered on into the digital era - in fact the first digital camera that I used in 1998 was an Agfa ePhoto 307, with a whopping 0.3 megapixel resolution!