Nowadays we may be able to snap pictures with our cell phones and pens and whatnot, but it wasn’t so long ago that you actually had to carry around a dedicated camera in order to capture that perfect moment. Recently, Germany’s Westlicht Photographica Auctions, known for their high class photographic collectors’ items, sold one of the earliest truly portable cameras, the O-Series Leica No. 107.
The Leica 107 was created in 1923 by Oskar Barnack as part of a small series of around 20 cameras developed to test the marketability of portable cameras. The seventh camera in the series, this antique camera also became the first Leica to be exported as it was sent to New York to be patented in the US.
(Courtesy of Gizmodo UK.)
This piece of photographic history sold for £240,000 (nearly $500,000 USD) at auction, making it the most expensive portable camera in the world. The auction also included such Leica scarcities as a 1956 gold-plated Leica M3 no. 834000 and a rare ‘Sheikh Al-Thani’ edition M6.
