Braun Nizo 801

Niezoldi and Krämer was founded in Munich in 1925, and Nizo is a contraction of the first name. Braun bought the firm in 1962 and kept the name, which is the moment these cameras enter Braun's design culture. Dieter Rams ran design at Braun from 1961, but the cameras themselves were the work of Robert Oberheim in his department, and Wright's auction catalogue attributes the 801 to Oberheim specifically, in 1975. The 801 is the top silent camera of the big silver family, sold alongside the 481 and the 561 and sharing one manual with them. The three differ essentially only in lens: 8 to 48mm on the 481, 7 to 56mm on the 561, 7 to 80mm here. Above it sat only the Nizo Professional; the sound models came later. What the camera is actually about is the shutter. It is a variable sector shutter, continuously adjustable from 150 degrees to fully closed, worked by a lever on the base. That gives you fades done by hand, exposure control independent of the aperture, and an automatic lap dissolve that winds back 63 frames and grows the new image over three and a half seconds. Very few Super 8 cameras of any make will do that. One story that is worth telling because it is verifiable and slightly absurd: at Wright's Dieter Rams sale in July 2018, a Nizo 801 with its case, stand and manual carried an estimate of 150 to 200 dollars and sold for 1,750. That is the design market rather than the film market, but it is a real number, and it tells you what these objects now mean to people who have never loaded one. The end came quickly. Niezoldi and Krämer and Braun's flash production were sold in 1980 to Eugen Bauer of Stuttgart. Production stopped in 1982, about 500 people lost their jobs and the Munich plant closed.

Deliberate, controlled shooting. The variable shutter is the headline and almost nothing else at this price has one: hand-worked fades, shutter-based exposure, short-time effects. An eleven-times range from a genuinely wide 7mm to 80mm on one body, at a constant f/1.8. Time-lapse and animation. Stepless intervals from six frames a second down to one frame a minute, single frame, and a long-exposure automatic that holds each frame open until it is correctly exposed — unusual, and still useful for night work. In-camera lap dissolves of 63 frames, done by the camera's own backwind. A real manual aperture and a split-image rangefinder, so it does not fight you. Tripod work: two bush sizes, a cable release, and a remote release cable that extends to a hundred metres. Where it falls short: silent only, so sync work needs an external recorder fed by the pulse socket. No macro at all on the plain 801 — minimum focus is 1.5 metres, and if macro matters you want the 801 macro or the Professional. About 1.4 to 1.5 kilos in a long body, so not a run-and-gun camera. The meter tops out at 160 ASA tungsten and 100 ASA daylight, which is the real constraint with modern stock. There is no manual ASA setting from the factory, so you cannot simply dial around a misread notch. And spares are effectively unobtainable — at least one German workshop now declines Nizo work for that reason.

Six fresh alkaline AAs, then run it at 18, at 24 and at 54 frames a second. If all three sound identical and fast, the speed selector is not working and you are looking at the capacitor fault below. Do this on fresh cells so you are not diagnosing a flat battery.

This is the most useful thing you can do with a Nizo. All three speeds, the interval settings, the zoom rocker, the filter slider, and above all the R control for the dissolve rewind. Intermittents that improve as you work them are contact oxidation, which is cheap. Things that never wake up are not.

If R is left engaged or its contacts are dirty, the camera locks solid and looks completely dead. Braun's own troubleshooting page lists exactly this. A great many broken 801s on the used market are this and nothing else.

Take the handgrip off and look into both with a light: the drive cells in the safety box, and the meter cells in their own chamber underneath. White or green bloom, crusted springs, green creep along the wires leaving the chamber. Creep that has reached the loom is the expensive kind.

Press the meter battery check. Point the camera at a bright then a dim scene on automatic and watch the needle sweep the aperture scale smoothly. Then switch to manual and check the needle follows the dial. A needle that is absent, stuck at one end or jumpy is the warning sign — and on this camera that is not only a metering problem, see the faults below.

Run the power zoom through its full travel both ways, then the manual zoom. And look at the front glass in raking light: it is exposed and scratches easily.

On the 801 you see either the picture or the aperture scale depending on where your eye sits. That is normal, not a fault.

Most cameras sent for repair are not broken. Put a fresh set in before you conclude anything, and do it before you test any other fault on this page, because tired cells imitate half of them. Use ordinary alkaline cells, not rechargeables. Not because rechargeables damage anything — they do not, and one or two makers supplied their own rechargeable packs — but because of three things that all read as a broken camera. A nickel-metal-hydride cell is 1.2 volts against an alkaline's 1.5, so six of them give 7.2 volts where the camera expects 9. A battery check built for alkalines reads that as flat. A meter calibrated at 1.5 volts reads the light wrong at 1.2. And ordinary rechargeables lose ten to fifteen per cent of their charge every month sitting in a drawer, so a camera used three times a year is dead every time you pick it up, where alkalines lose two or three per cent in a year. If you want rechargeables anyway, use low-self-discharge cells, charge them the week you shoot, and trust the battery check less. Never mix old and new cells, or two chemistries, in one camera. And take them out when you put the camera away: a leaking cell is the commonest way a working camera becomes a dead one.

Cartridges do jam, and it is not always the camera. Shooters have reported cartridges that would not advance in one body and ran perfectly in another, and the same fault following the cartridge rather than the camera across different models. The test takes ten seconds and settles it. Take the cartridge out, mark the film through the front window with a permanent pen, put it back, run the camera two or three seconds, and take it out again. If the mark has gone, the film moved. Three separate labs give that same test. Then swap. Try a different cartridge in the same camera, or the same cartridge in a different camera. One bad roll points at the cartridge. Three bad rolls point at the camera. Things that mislead people: the footage counter can move while the film does not, so it proves nothing on its own. And check each roll reads EXPOSED at the end before you send it off. If it jams, do not open the cartridge. You cannot inspect it without fogging the film, and you destroy both the footage and the evidence. Send it to the lab anyway — they open it in darkness and can often recover what was shot. Kodak runs a feedback form for cartridges, and some sellers will replace a jammed one. One popular explanation is worth correcting: the story that Vision3 stocks jam because their base is thicker, being designed for 16mm and 35mm. Kodak's own data describes the 35mm and Super 8 versions of a stock identically and publishes no base thickness at all. The only documented difference is between negative and reversal film, and the lab that documents it says the thicker negative helps rather than hurts. The jams that are documented were on reversal stock.

The failed 100 microfarad electrolytic capacitor on the motor control board, mounted on the motor plate. Repairers call it the culprit, well hidden under the motor board. Spot it by running all three speeds and listening. The fix is a replacement capacitor, which can be mounted externally on flying leads if the original position is inaccessible. It needs the camera stripped to the motor plate and soldering on a dense board, so it is a technician's job — but it is a cheap part and a known repair, not a scrapped camera.

Forty years of blackening on low-current switch contacts, plus humidity. Symptoms: dead or intermittent, one frame rate missing with 24 fps the classic casualty, stuttering, an unresponsive zoom, a sticking shutter lever. German repairers document cleaning seven separate contact sets on a single camera. Cleaning accessible contacts and exercising switches is within reach at home; a full switch-bank strip-down is not, because the internal springs are delicate. The prevention is free: work all the controls regularly, including the ones you never use.

The meter needs two 1.35 volt mercury cells, 2.7 volts in total, and those have not been made for decades. Modern 625-size cells give 1.5 volts each and the meter reads wrong. This is not merely a metering problem. The iris is driven by the meter movement, so a dead meter can leave you with no usable aperture control in either mode. Braun's manual says accurate exposure is impossible without working cells. Three fixes, in ascending order. Zinc-air hearing-aid cells with a centring sleeve give the correct voltage but a short life. A Gossen-type adapter lets a modern silver-oxide cell be used. The proper answer is an internal voltage regulator that derives a stable 2.7 volts from the camera's own AA cells and deletes the button cells entirely — documented builds use an LM317 calibrated to 2.7 volts, and ready-made modules exist. Whoever does it must remove any remaining button cells afterwards or the camera misbehaves. Worth knowing: the Nizo Professional does not have this problem at all. Braun already powered its meter from the AA cells.

The drive cells sit in a removable safety box inside the handgrip, and Braun designed that box specifically to keep leaking electrolyte off the camera's own contacts. So a corroded 801 is usually a corroded box, which is far better news than a corroded body. The meter chamber has no such protection, and leakage there corrodes wiring. Cleaning is a home fix; re-wiring is not.

Nizo repairers replace the deteriorating sealing strips as routine, before the crumbs migrate into switches and optics. On this camera the risk is contamination rather than fogged film. The most do-it-yourself job on the camera.

Hardened lubricant in the zoom helicoid. The old grease has to come out completely first — fresh grease on top of old is useless. Cleaning the barrel is borderline doable; recollimating afterwards is not, for most people. One thing not to do: repairers examining an 801-family camera found the motor gearbox dry by design, carrying only its original trace of lubricant, and deliberately left it alone. Do not let anyone re-grease the gearbox on the theory that it needs it.

The camera runs, the motor is audible, and the film does not advance because the upper gear has spun on its mount and can no longer transmit force. Documented once. The fix is to slacken the mounting screw, re-seat the gear and re-tighten. A technician's job, but a cheap one.

Braun supplied a factory rechargeable pack for this camera — six nickel-cadmium cells in the same box, rated at about ten cartridges per charge — so a nominal 7.2 volt supply was a sanctioned way to run an 801. Modern rechargeables are therefore acceptable here in a way they are not on some cameras. Braun's manual nonetheless recommends alkaline. If you do use rechargeables, use low-self-discharge cells, check the battery test needle before every roll, and keep a charged spare set. Braun's own troubleshooting page blames both "will not start" and "stutters" on weak drive cells, so do not diagnose any other fault until you have ruled that out. And do not carry the rule from the later sound cameras over to this one. The Nizo 6080 is specified for rechargeables at 1.2 volts per cell; the 801 is specified for alkalines. Listings confuse the two constantly.