Agfa Isolar (the plates, not the camera).

Hello all, first post here, hope it's the proper place.

I've recently got hold of some sealed half plate size Agfa Isolar orthochromatic plates and was wondering if any of you could help me narrow down a date. I collect glass negatives that have already been exposed and they tend to have date clues in the images.



From my initial research it appears they were introduced around 1902 (see the text just above "things worth knowing") and that logo form was in use at the time.



I do have an image from a dutch publication reportedly from 1899 that shows an advertisement for Agfa Isolar plates (and that logo) but I've been unable to confirm the date of that as it's not actually on the document itself).

I've not been able to find that logo in use after 1914, I presume they changed it during WW1.


I've compiled these (and some more images) on imgur.

Does anyone know when either:
Isolar glass plates were discontinued?
Agfa stopped making half plate sizes?
The eagle logo stopped being used?
The packaging started/stopped being in English?

Any of this info (or anything else I haven't thought of) will certainly help. Fingers crossed.

Cheers, Simon.

The logo you refer to was used when Agfa still was a dye-stuff manufacturer with photographic products still being a minor business. With this business growing Agfa for this only used their word-mark added with "Photo-Artikel", later only the ward-mark.

However this all was not stringent and I doubt one could deduce in that period from a logo to a year of production.
In these years a concept as corporate identity was just being introduced to industry in Germany.

AgX said:

The logo you refer to was used when Agfa still was a dye-stuff manufacturer with photographic products still being a minor business. With this business growing Agfa for this only used their word-mark added with "Photo-Artikel", later only the ward-mark.

However this all was not stringent and I doubt one could deduce in that period from a logo to a year of production.
In these years a concept as corporate identity was just being introduced to industry in Germany.

Click to expand...

Thanks, that’s good info. I’ll keep searching for more clues.