A product distributor, Froehlich sought to solve a frustration in the American marketplace: consumers had to choose between simplistic cameras made available by Kodak, or extremely sophisticated and expensive German imports. He learned that the Japanese had a good middle ground: much better cameras than point-and-shoots, at pretty reasonable post-war prices.
In 1951, he secured the rights to distribute Konica cameras in the U.S., and created a new market. “it was his insight into what people were after that allowed him to help revive the Japanese camera industry after World War II,” said photo magazine editor Bob Rose, adding that Froehlich “was one of the founders of the photo industry as we know it today.”
Then, in the 1980s, when film movie cameras starting giving way to the camcorder, he and his partners created a pushbutton system that would transfer existing 8mm movies to video. Froehlich died January 24 from a heart attack. He was 85.