The story
Founding
The business recalls its roots to Swiss photographer Carl August Koch who worked in Marseille from 1865 to 1878. In 1879 and 1892 Koch also established two family-owned photography studios in Schaffhausen. Koch worked as a portrait, landscape and alpine photographer and was considered one of the first Swiss champions of alpine photography. From 1894 until his death in 1897, Koch was also president of the Swiss Photographers Association.
His son Hans-Carl expanded the family-owned photography studios to add retail sales of photographic equipment, starting from 1911.
Sinar system
In 1947, the grandson of Koch senior, Carl Hans, a graduate photographer and photographic salesman, took over the family business on the early death of his father Hans-Carl, and founded the following year the Sinar company. Dissatisfied with the limited or imprecise nature of existing wooden view cameras (e.g. the large Kodak 3 and similar, and the popular Graflex Graphic Graflok series) and the limitations of technical (e.g. Linhof Technika) and field cameras of the day, he developed a modular camera and received in 1947 a patent for his Sinar camera. His main aims were to produce a large format monorail camera system of high precision and simple operation, with readily interchangeable parts and accessories.
The Sinar system's versatility is based on the interchangeability of parts as well as a large number of accessories that have been produced over the years. Major components (rails, bellows, lensboards, and standards) made in the 1940s are still usable with currently manufactured Sinar equipment.
In 1968 Carl Hans' son entered the family business and the company's camera production moved to Feuerthalen (north of Zürich).
Changing ownership
Jenoptik acquired a majority stake (51%) of Sinar in 2005. Leica Camera announced it had purchased Jenoptik's stake in 2006, but the sale was cancelled before the end of the year. When Jenoptik withdrew from the medium format camera market, Sinar was spun off in July 2009. Sinar moved its base of operations to Zürich in October 2009 after separating from Jenoptik.
On 26 November 2013 Leica Camera AG took over Sinar Photography AG.
From Wikipedia’s article on Sinar, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4