Interesting home built camera sold on ebay

[Brian Legge]

I can thank the I Shoot Film group on flickr for pointing this one out.

http://cgi.ebay.de/UNIQUE-CAMERZ-PH...325?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item33628abbdd

To my untrained eye, it looks like a home made TLR with an eye level finder using large format lenses to project onto a long roll of 70mm film... with a a hot shoe.

 

[Morinaka]

I saw this explanation for it on a flickr thread, i take no credit.

"This was very likely a school portrait camera, Those Raptars look like the came off from Ciroflex cameras. The Norita prism came from a Japanese-made Norita 66, which "Graflex" imported under their brand. It has no relationship whatsoever with Graflex. School portrait cameras typically used lengthy spools of film, because you would not want to have to constantly reload film while shooting hundreds of kids.
Actually, if you look carefully at those lenses, they say they were made for "Camerz" which is the logo in the side of the school portrait camera. That was marketed by Photo Control Corporation, which makes school portrait (digital) systems now, and were acquired by Norman a while back. "