Q.R.S. Kamra c1928

The Tomei Collection

In the Summer of 1939, or perhaps 1940, a family packed up their car and drove to New York City to visit the World's Fair. To record the memories they also packed their then 10 year old camera and six loaded cassettes with 35mm film. In the intervening decades we have lost their names but the reflections of those bygone days are still with us.

The Q.R.S. Kamra, or DeVry Model-K-1, was first introduced in 1928 and was offered for a brief period thereafter. It was produced by the Q.R.S. Company of Chicago that had become the largest American manufacturer of player pianos and piano rolls before WWI. By the late 1920's they were producing several motion picture projectors and cameras as well as a number of other products in their broad product portfolio. In 1929, Q.R.S. consummated a merger with the DeVry Corporation to form the Q.R.S.-DeVry Corporation. Although this company lasted less than three years, it produced a number of cine cameras and projectors.

The Model-K-1 Kamra was offered by Q.R.S. prior to the merger and did not last very long after the merger probably since it did not fit well into the new DeVry product line. It took 35mm cinema film stock that had to be loaded into the special cassettes. It was capable of loading enough film for 40 or more frames at one time.

It is not clear where Q.R.S. got the idea, but the Kamra body was constructed from molded early plastic made of phenolic resin mixed with waste cotton cloth. If the camera is examined closely, fragments of woven cotton rags that went into the resin mixture can be seen. One can only speculate as to why they did not use conventional Bakelite but it is safe to say that the Q.R.S. formulation was probably cheaper to produce.

The miniature 35mm camera was first marketed successfully by Leica in the mid-1920's. There was clearly a need not only for a small versatile camera, but also a need to utilize the vast production of 35mm film by several manufacturers which normally went to movie making.

It is interesting to note that in 1928 there was no standard 35mm still format although Oskar Barnack had committed to the 24mm x 36mm frame size by 1925. Q.R.S. decided to use a 24mm x 32mm frame size in the Kamra. This format was not to appear again in any camera until 1947 when, for equally obscure reasons, Nikon used it in their newly designed rangefinder camera. The world having forgotten the Kamra, the 24mm x 32mm frame became know as the "Japanese format" by the late 1940's though it soon disappeared altogether by 1952. However, it was to appear one more time but in a very different camera design - the digital SLR.

The Kamra has a fixed-focus Graf 40mm f/7.7 lens and a single speed shutter operated by a crank that also advances the film. The crank was made of brittle die cast white metal and is usually found broken if not lost as you can see in this example.

This example arrived with five cassettes and in one, a roll of Dupont panchromatic B&W film. Most of the salvageable frames are shown here. Remarkably, they were taken in 1939 or 1940 at the New York World's Fair with even a side trip to St. Patrick's cathedral in Manhattan. The frames were digitized and processed with Photoshop since the original images are very degraded and were poorly exposed in the first place some 68 years ago. None the less, they are presented here along with the original camera.

Q.R.S. Kamra c1928 The Tomei Collection

Q.R.S. Kamra c1928

The Tomei Collection