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D. Scott Young

Starting up a new photographic manufacturing company amidst the ruins of the immediate aftermath of a great World War was an almost impossible challenge to the Minox, Gmbh that incorporated in Wetzlar, Germany in the autumn of 1945. With only a handful of the original employees who had anaged to filter in from scattered locations, some of them with the original dies and tools made for the production of the Riga Minox, production resumed. However, a new design was decided upon as many of the original Riga Minox parts were still lost or unavailable due to the exigencies of war. With raw materials and other resources at a premium, the Model II represented for the new company an attempt to reintroduce the already popular Minox camera with additional improvements and refinements. Ironically, what actually made it to market was a model that almost ruined the company’s reputation before it was replaced by the improved Model III.

At various stages in their production, Model II cameras were the first and only models of Minox 8 x 11 cameras to have a milled in, removable hatch to allow access to the lens chamber for shutter speed testing using a tiny periscope type device Minox specially designed and made for this purpose. This was because the original shutter blades were black, and could not reflect light well. Later model Minox cameras used silver coloured shutter blades which reflected light quite well, allowing the use of an external measuring device to determine the accuracy of the shutter speed settings by Minox technicians. It has been erroneously reported in more than one book that this hatch was designed to allow the user to clean the film lens, but as Donald Goldberg of D.A.G. Camera Repair has pointed out, the lens chamber is essentially a sealed unit and would not have allowed dust to enter in the first place. The user would never have needed to open the access port, born out by the fact that a very special factory tool was required to open it, and a lot of care used in seating it back in place before screwing it back down. The side of the lens that might have needed cleaning (the side in contact with the film) was actually facing out on the film chamber.

Donald Goldberg also provided the fascinating tidbit of information that
apparently more than a few Model II cameras were made from the aluminum
skin of downed aircraft: due to the extreme shortage of raw materials
right after World War II, the aluminum recovered from these aircraft provided a cheap (free) source of material for the body shells. One of the many unusual stories to come back to Minox involved an American woman who served as a ferry pilot during World War II, ferrying new aeroplancs from the factory in America to their bases in England. When she sent her Model
II in for repair and service, after mentioning who she was, she was jokingly told that there was a very good possibility that she was now shooting photographs with her old aeroplane!

Designed by Arthur Seibert in response to Walter Zapp's desire to eliminate curvilinear distortion (the slight loss of sharpness at the edges of a photograph from the original Riga Minox lens design), the Pentar lens can only be considered now as a poor design. Essentially, the film was curved around the rearmost glass element of the lens, in full physical contact with it. It stayed in contact with the lens during the film advance cycle, dragging it across the lens and quite often horribly scratching the negatives in the process. The poor reputation of this lens design was such that when Seibert later produced his superb Compensating Plane lens (Complan) Minox quietly retrofitted many Model II's with them as they came back for service or cleaning. Consequently, although the Complan Lens design was officially introduced in the Model III camera, there exist a small number of converted Model II's. This camera became known as the "Model II" retroactively, after the introduction of the Model III; previously, it had merely been known as a "Minox" camera.