2026-03-26 The Agfa Karat Proximeter Close Focusing Device

The Agfa Karat Proximeter I is a gorgeous close-up accessory for the Agfa Karat cameras. It came in a tooled leather case that is a marvel all by itself that we will return to later.

The Agfa Karat cameras had a rather unique style of viewfinder/rangefinder. If you examine the camera closely you can see the left and right viewfinder windows are high on the left and low on the right. You adjust the view until the top half of the view lines up with the bottom view. None of that pathetic small window in the middle of the view business. You are working with lining up the entire frame!

Unfortunately the camera can only focus as close as 1 m or 3½ feet. The Proximeter allows you to focus down to half that distance (100 to 50 cm or 40 to 20 inches) while the huge prism corrects for parallax. There was a Proximeter II that covered the range from 50-33 cm or 20-13 inches. You could stack the two Proximeters and get down to 33-25 cm or 13-10 inches.

This is the Proximeter I all by itself.

It has this nameplate on the top of the prism.

On the bottom of the prism “Made in Germany” is engraved into the frame.

Here there are some fingers in the shot as we don’t have the camera to mount it on for scale.

Neither the prism or the close-up filter seem to show an optical effect when held up to a printed box.

This is the leather case. It is really tightly built to hold the Proximeter.

So they built in a leather tab you pull to lift the Proximeter out of its slot.

Carved into leather are the distances of the three combinations of Proximeter I, Proximeter II and Proximeter I and II together.

Here is a tighter view of the distance scale.

Finally, the back of the case has two vertical strap slots, so you can carry the Proximeter with you while your camera is safely stored in an eveready leather case.

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