Let’s just call it “the big black phone”. It is sold under different (probably fake) brands in different African countries by different carriers and resellers. This phone doesn’t really have an official name. “The big black phone” - Photo by Emmanuel Quartey It’s about turning ordinary people into superheroes. It comes from connecting that technology to people, and through that connection, empowering and enabling them to achieve things they could never do otherwise. True innovation doesn’t only come from cutting edge technology. And it truly lived up to the promise they made: it was not a home video camera for recording memories, but a great, empowering experience for novice or amateur filmmakers, with close-to-zero practice with analogue materials, of making a vision come true. I had the chance to use a Nizo only once in my life (it was a Nizo Integral 5, one of the last models Braun made) when I shot my first short film. And commercial success followed - Nizo made 10 cameras a day in the 1930s - by the 1970s, the apex of the Super8 boom, they made 300. Based on the the original, truly advanced technology, and the Nizo promise of turning filmmaking available for everyone, combined with the vision of the early 1960s Braun (and the rare talent of Robert Oberheim) created the true design masterpieces known to every Braun fan and vintage camera lover. Braun bought the company in 1962 and saved it from bankruptcy. They were complicated, hard to understand, hard to use, and really not a great commercial success. Still, it would be quite an overstatement to call these cameras “design icons” (check out the Heliomatic SR2 from 1951). What they did was quite a technology innovation: they built a special clockwork drive that made it possible to use this camera without special equipment (like a crank and a tripod) and special knowledge.
![inspireme products inspireme products](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/53/f8/43/53f8438eaf163fea86e041a8be5aae59.jpg)
Actually, these cameras were originally produced by Niezoldi & Krämer GMBH, a small camera maker from Germany, founded in 1925, debuting with their Nizo 35, advertised as one of the first amateur film cameras.
![inspireme products inspireme products](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/d4/48/c0d448a03bf7152b93daad9a118fe2a6.png)
They had some great designs back in the Rams era. No “great product” list without at least one from Braun. Braun Nizo S8 (1965) -Source: Phrontis via Wikimedia Commons