World's oldest and most expensive camera up for auction

The world’s oldest (and possibly most expensive) camera will go under the auctioneer’s hammer in Vienna later this year.

WestLicht Photographica will auction a ' Daguerréotype' - the first commercially-produced camera made in Paris in 1839 by Alphonse Giroux.

The wooden sliding-box camera is expected to sell for more than $1 million (the estimate is between Euro500,000 and Euro700,000).

In drumming up worldwide interest in the sale, the auction company said there is no record of the total number of cameras that Giroux produced, but since cheaper and improved cameras came onto the market relatively quickly, it is assumed that the numbers were very limited.

Only very few of these cameras are known to exist worldwide and all of those are in public museum collections.

The Giroux 'Daguerreotype' up for auction was in private ownership in northern Germany for generations and is in “outstanding” original condition for a 170 year-old apparatus.

An original manual in German language from 1839 is also included in the sale.