A highly anticipated panoramic Widelux recreation and a small avalanche of fake YouTube videos.
SilverBridges, a new camera manufacturer founded by a well-known Hollywood actor and the founders of an analogue photography print magazine, has just unveiled their new camera: WideluxX™ Prototype 0001. The camera is a faithful recreation of the original, highly regarded swing-lens panoramic camera, made with modern materials and tooling in Germany.
The issue with the vintage Widelux cameras is the imprecise manufacturing process, which made them difficult to repair. A factory fire that destroyed all documents and blueprints for the cameras made repairs (which often need documentation) even more difficult, including the job of this company trying to recreate this incredible product.
Thankfully for vintage Widelux owners, SilverBridges aims to make its new camera fully compatible with vintage Wideluxes, including full parts interchangeability for (relatively) easy repairs.
I met with Charys Schuler, one of the founders of SilverBridges, earlier this year at an event in Vancouver. I wrote about it here: analog.cafe/r/widelux-fake….
Fake YouTube videos.
SilverBridges made an announcement about this prototype on their website earlier this week (silvergrainclassics.com/en…). However, that post had little more information other than a few photos of the camera. The majority of the reveal should be in a video format, to be posted on the WideluxX website later.
Yet the interest in this camera, perhaps even Jeff Bridges’ name, seems to have already caused a small avalanche of fake YouTube videos that are supposed to be Charys and Marwan’s presentation of the camera, but are instead a single static image and an AI-generated voice spilling nonsense. Don’t waste your time on these.
Dmitri