The Prakticamat

The Prakticamat is one of the forgotten cameras and yet it was an important design in its day. To begin with, it was the first European camera fitted with through the lens (TTL) metering, arriving on the scene surprisingly soon after the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic from Japan.

It was a product of the East German photographic consortium VEB Pentacon. This was the organisation which had absorbed the East German Zeiss company, itself the producer of the first mass production SLR with a fixed pentatprism - the Contax S.

After East Germany lost the right to use the Contax trademark, the pentaprism camera was relabeled as the Pentacon. With some dramatic price cutting, this continued to sell well for some years but, eventually, the design was merged with another East German camera line, the Praktiflex. Out of this merger grew two lines of development, the Praktina range, aimed at the serious amateur or professional photographer, and the Praktica range for the budget conscious buyer.

Price Cutting

The Praktina achieved some success in its field but the arrival of high quality cameras from Japan, at affordable prices, squeezed the Praktina's market share to the point where the East Germans obviously saw no point in continuing with it. As a result, the company's effort was concentrated on the budget Praktica range. To begin with, the Prakticas held their own, models like the Praktica IV and V being solidly built, if not overly exciting, cameras that could compete on price with most of the Japanese competition.

As Japanese market share increased, though, the East Germans made the disasterous mistake of competing purely on price. To this end, the management cut production costs to the bone, the result being the Praktica Nova series, a range of cameras which did VEB Pentacon no favours in the popularity stakes. Good as the Novas could be when they worked, too often they didn't. Praktica soon became the brand you bought if you wanted a SLR and couldn't really afford one.

Things only got worse when the Soviet Union got in on the act with its ultra low cost, totally basic Zenith range. Suddenly East Germany's Warsaw Pact allies were cutting the ground out from under VEB Pentacon and there were few if any handholds to be seen.

Fight Back

The East Germans' solution was a redesign of the Nova, known confusingly as the 'Nova 1', which at least brought it up to date with such little luxuries as a non-rotating shutter speed dial. They also addressed some of the reliability issues (if you find a working Praktica Nova today it's much more likely to be one of these re-designed '1' models).

The real fight-back, though, was seen to be in providing top-end features at affordable prices. Thus was born the Prakticamat, intended to take VEB Pentacon back into the advanced amateur and professional market that the demise of the Praktina had pitched them out of some years earlier.

Beside it's TTL metering, the 'mat featured shutter speeds to 1/1000 sec, unheard of on a Praktica, a non-rotating shutter dial situated around the rewind knob and VEB Pentacon's trade-mark angled shutter release. If you haven't tried this feature, you have no idea how useful it is. Amazingly, shared only with the Japanese Petri range, this feature is probably worth two stops of extra steadiness to the novice photographer and contributed much to the Praktica's reputation for providing surprisingly sharp pictures.

Speaking of sharp pictures, the East Germans had one ace up their sleeves in the form of the Carl Zeiss Jenna and Meyer Optik lens ranges. The standard lens for the Prakticamat was the Meyer Optik Oreston, a 50mm/f1.8 design of very acceptable performance. There was a good range of choice if you stayed with the East German ranges but there were also the Japanese M42 lenses such as the renowned Asahi Optical Takumar range.

Improved Build Quality

The build qualityof the Prakticamat was an improvement on the Nova, pretty well essential as the new camera was intended to fight nose to nose with Asahi's Spotmatic. Unfortunately, the improvements didn't go as far as they needed to and the mechanics of a Prakticamat seem very rough compared to any Japanese camera of the day.

At first glance, it looked like no contest, the Pentax's obviously better fit and feel, typified by the 'Just Hold a Pentax' advertising campaign, making the Prakticamat look positively clunky. A long hard look merely justified this view.

First up was pricing. VEB Pentacon's management had swung from one extreme to the other and the Prakticamat was ten per cent more expensive at launch time than the Spotmatic in the UK, where the Japanese camera was being aggressively re-priced to see off the sudden appearance of competiton from both Canon with its FT and Nippon Kogaku's Nikkormat,

The Prakticamat's viewfinder did it no favours, either. Inherited from the Nova, the over agressive use of a fresnel field lens made focussing difficult. To be fair, the provision of both a large microprism focussing area and a  split screen rangefinder spot went some way to retrieving the situation but compared to the Japanese offering it was pretty unimpressive.

There were good points, such as the clever and very effective stop-down metering button situated below the shutter release. Not only does this fall comfortably under the user's third finger when his forefinger is on the release button but it is very highly geared, requiring very little pressure to both switch on the meter and stop down the lens. Another nice touch, inherited from the Nova, is a red 'finger' at the top left of the viewfinder which shows when the film needs winding.

But these little frills did nothing to address the Praktica range's main problem. Camera engineering had moved forward but the Praktica range had, if anything, moved backwards. Compare the operation of a Prakticamat with any Japanese SLR of its day and you'll immediately notice how rough the film wind feels and how 'tinny' the shutter sounds. A customer in the showroom, getting ready to part with a month's salary or more, was all too likely to notice such things.

The Prakticamat was officially on sale from 1965 to 1969 but is only listed in a single edition of the Wallace Heaton Blue Book for 1966-67. Strangely, a display advertisement in the 1968-69 edition of the Blue Book shows the Prakticamat along with the Pentacon Super and Praktica Super TL (see below) but the Prakticamat is not listed in the main catalogue, although the rest of the range is. Wallace Heaton had apparently learned very quickly just what the market thought of the Prakticamat.

In fact, it looks rather as if the UK importers themselves quietly lost interest in the camera, which probably explains the Prakticamat's scarcity. VEB Pentacon, to be fair, had already learned their lesson and brought out the Super-TL, little more than a Nova 1 with the TTL system of the Prakticamat in 1968. No less profoundly unreliable than the Nova, the Super-TL also shared the Nova's virtue of cheapness, costing less than two-thirds of what a Prakticamat had been offered at. You can find plenty of Praktica Super-TLs on the used market today but finding one that works properly is a different matter.

The Final Fling

The East Germans hadn't entirely lost sight of their goal, though, and at the same time as the Super-TL launched a highly professional camera, the Pentacon Super. Unfortunately this beast, effectively a Nikon F with a 42mm screw thread lens mount, was far too expensive for the market and sank without trace, even more quickly than the Prakticamat.

The Prakticamat was, unfortunately, the wrong camera at the wrong price. It wasn't all bad and I have two examples, both working, despite one of them having suffered the sort of abuse that only Nikons are supposed to survive. Neither of them could be described as smooth operators but then, Prakticamats never were, even when new. Like all Prakticas of the period, Prakticamats are prone to strange and unexplained failures and jams, some of which can be cured by judicous fiddling with the controls or, in the case of a locked up mirror, by gently prising the carrier down. It's not what you want if you're on an assignment, though.

The Prakticamat can be a satisfying camera to use and it's certainly a distinctive design, although for many, it's an aquired taste. When they do come up, Prakticamats seem to go fairly cheaply so perhaps you may wish to see what you think of East Germany's answer to the Japanese TTL invasion.

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