Did Dieter Rams design flashes for Metz?

[Dante_Stella]

So I was poking around on that infamous auction site and found this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/151764485377?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

and this

http://www.ebay.com/itm/291670626232?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

See also the Agfatronic 252.

These are German domestic market flash units. So looking at the 28C3 and the 38CT3, they look a lot like Braun electric shavers and the Braun ET66 calculator. Which is not exactly a surprise, since Dieter Rams definitely designed things for Braun, which was one of the rebrands of Metz flashes.

So for you industrial design fetishists, do you think he was sidelining on these? Or that someone at Metz was emulating him?

BTW, those flash heads do not bounce. The diffuser rotates to wide-angle, The knob on the outside is for ISO. The 28C3, I figured out, puts the flash much further off the the lens axis than about anything else on the market, an inch higher than an 58AF, which itself is not a small flash.

Dante

 

[bmattock]

I always thought he had designed the red button Agfa cameras. Cool designs, but I've never been able you own one of the cameras or flashes.

 

[majid]

The only flashes mentioned in "Dieter Rams - As Little Design as Possible" are three Braun models: EF 1, F 111, EF 300.

 

[sevo]

Some flashes were sold both as Braun and Metz, and Metz took over some flashes which Braun determined not to market any more. Some Metz flashes are obviously designed so that they could credibly be relabelled as Braun. But I can find no indications whether that happened at Metz, a third party consultant or even someone in the Braun design department. Whoever it will have been, it will hardly have been Rams himself, as Braun would hardly have lent their top designer (and member of the supervisory board) to a external company - by that time, he was directing their corporate design guidelines, and rarely involved in an actual product design any more.

The Agfa Optima Sensor series, by the way, was designed by Schlagheck/Schultes, which were Ulm design school graduates from the same generation as Rams, and also designed Agfa flashes made by Metz. So Metz had input steering them towards Ulm style designs from multiple clients - and there were even more Ulm designers they might have contracted...

 

[Dralowid]

If I have this right one of the best examples of Dieter Rams work for Braun is the Nizo series of Super 8 cameras.