The company went public in 1873, and by 1894, the company expanded into the photographic chemicals and film industry. In their early years, AGFA made dyes and other stains for industrial use. AGFA was an acronym for their German name, Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation. The original AGFA company was founded in 1867 in a borough of Berlin, Germany called Rummelsburg. Over the past few decades, this company has gone through many ownership changes and reorganizations to where the existing AGFA company bares little resemblance to the one that developed the Optima I. Today, the name AGFA exists as Agfa-Gevaert N.V., a Belgium owned multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, and distributes analog and digital imaging products and systems. Lens: 45mm f/2.8 AGFA Color Agnar coated 3-elementsįlash Mount: Coldshoe and M and X Flash Sync The entire Optima series helped to usher in a new era of point and shoot fully automatic cameras that would set the stage for modern cameras for decades to come.

The Optima I was a less expensive version of the original model. It’s selenium meter would allow the camera to automatically choose a proper exposure setting with minimal input from the user. It was the followup to the original Optima from 1959 which was one of the very first cameras with a fully automatic program auto exposure mode. This is an AGFA Optima I produced between the years 1960 – 64.

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