O.P.L. Foca
Two Star ** (engraved; bis)

by Karen Nakamura

Overview and Personal Comments

Although German, Japan, and the USA were the only major camera manufacturers in the late 20th century, the early part of the century had companies in France, Italy, and other European nations actively designing and producing camera systems for their citizens.

Optique et Précision de Levallois (OPL) was founded in 1923 to produce optical instruments for aviation, marine, and military purposes. They set about in 1938 to make a camera, based roughly on the wildly popular Leica rangefinder. The war and German occupation intervened with those plans.

The Foca finally emerged in 1945, after the war, as the PF series. PF stands for petit format or small format (35mm). Confusingly, PF Focas do not have standard model numbers, instead using a series of * stars.

With the PF2 series, the rangefinder only couples to the 50mm normal lens. There were interchangeable PF2 lenses, but I'm not sure how you would focus them.

My original lens was quite difficult to remove, it took a good bit of strength. If I wasn't convinced that it would actually come off, I wouldn't have tried to do it.

There are also a series of bayonet mount cameras and lenses, I'm trying to find more information about them.

Foca vs. Leica

The PF Foca has many similarities to a Leica "Barnack" rangefinder:

• Horizontal running focal-plane cloth shutter
• Screw mount interchangeable lens system
• Oplar 50mm f/3.5 collapsible lens is a spitting image of the Elmar 50mm lens

There are also some dissimiarities:

• A much easier removable-back for film-loading (the Leica is bottom loading, even now)
• Combined rangefinder/viewfinder (the Leica didn't get this until the M3 of the 1950s!)
• The RF helical is built into the camera body on my camera. This means only the 50mm normal lens will be coupled to the rangefinder

Technical Details

About OPL

Optique et Précision de Levallois (OPL) was founded in 1923 to produce optical instruments for aviation, marine, and military purposes. They set about in 1938 to make a camera, based roughly on the wildly popular Leica rangefinder. The war and German occupation intervened with those plans, but by 1942 the Germans encourage the release of the the FOCA rangefinder system. They produced cameras well up to the late 1950s, releasing the SLR FocaFlex in 1959, which featured innovative TTL metering.

On the Net

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