Florian Pesth <fpe### [at] gmxde> wrote:
> Apparently the german company inventing this type of camera (or so says
> german wikipedia), Rollei, just closed down. In the end they seemed to
> make modern middle format cameras. It seems there are not many german
> companies around anymore in this business. Ok, there is Leica, but they
> are ridiculous expensive. Zeiss is mostly producing for industrial
> applications. A lot of companies around Dresden closed down. It seems all
> this industry was excelled by japanese companies. I wonder why - I mean I
> can name several excellent japanese companies (and I'm very satisfied
> with my Nikon D80) but if I would want to buy an excellent german DSLR I
> simply couldn't because no one here makes it anymore. The thing is, that
> there was a lot of optical industry and know how in germany. Did they
> simply slumber it? Anyone know why they lost?

This is my interpretation of the events:

Virtually all of the former German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) has
had a rough time in the transition from socialism to capitalism; traditional
markets in the Warsaw Pact countries became difficult to maintain due to the
political shift, and also less profitable due to the adoption of the West
German currency; the only existing footholds in the western world had been in
niche markets for top-quality optics, which had been a welcome byproduct during
the socialist era to get western money into the country, but weren't enough to
sustain the whole optical industry that had developed in that area.

The West German optical industry had basically been overrun by Asian products
much earlier, and had already retreated into the niche markets of high-quality
optics by the time Germany was re-united in 1989.

The major reason was that the German companies had always been excellent at
producing high-quality optics, but Asian companies (at that time mostly
Japanese) were better at virtually everything else, like electronics, systems,
and - last not least - pricing. With technical innovation in optics progressing
slower than in those other fields, the German companies rather quickly fell
behind on the end-user market, and had to give it up, retreating to production
of highly specialized cameras as well as optics for other companies'
high-quality ranges of products.

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