Agfa B-2 Cadet camera, 1937

The Agfa B-2 Cadet is a simple box camera introduced in 1937 by Agfa. Even though the Cadet is a German camera designed in Germany, it was actually manufactured in Binghamton, New York in the factory of American camera company Ansco since they were owned by Agfa at the time. In fact, the company was known as Agfa-Ansco from 1928 until 1941 when the United States entered the Second World War and seized control of Ansco back from the Germans.

Being a simple box camera, the Agfa B-2 Cadet features a basic meniscus lens with a fixed aperture and a simple rotary shutter that has two speeds: 1/60 and time (achieved by pulling out the metal tab next to the shutter lever). To load and unload film, the film door must first be unlatched then the frame advance lever must be pulled to allow the camera’s internals to slide out. The Cadet accepts 120 film (designated as B-2 film by Agfa). As is relatively common with other box cameras at the time, the B-2 features two waist-level viewfinders: one for portrait (located on top) and one for landscape when the camera is rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise.