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Henry Froehlich, one of the first distributors of high-tech Japanese cameras in the United States and one of the developers of an easy process for transferring home movies from film to videotape, died in Manhattan last Thursday. He was 85 and lived in Larchmont, N.Y.

The cause was a heart attack, said Ray Vitiello, a vice president of Mr. Froehlich’s company, the MAC Group.

In an interview on Tuesday, Bob Rose, a technical editor for two photography magazines, Rangefinder and AfterCapture, said Mr. Froehlich “was one of the founders of the photo industry as we know it today.”

Mr. Froehlich was a distributor, Mr. Rose said, “but it was his insight into what people were after that allowed him to help revive the Japanese camera industry after World War II.”

Buyers were looking for reliable, sophisticated cameras, Mr. Rose said. “The prior choice was the very expensive German camera or the snapshot Kodak variant.”

In 1951, after acquiring United States distribution rights for Konica cameras from the Konishiroku Photo Industry Company of Japan, Mr. Froehlich started the Konica Camera Company in Philadelphia. In 1961, his company merged with Berkey Photo, which distributed other lines of Japanese photo products. Mr. Froehlich was president of Berkey Photo until 1982.

He then started another company, Froehlich FotoVideo, to meet a new demand prompted by the era of the videotape. As Mr. Rose explained: “Henry took products that existed and, together with his partners, Jan Lederman and Ray Vitiello, packaged these matched components — a projector, a transfer lens system, a video camera and a videotape recorder — so that all the lab or minilab had to do was load a reel of 8-millimeter film, push a button, and it would transfer from film to videotape.”

In 1987, with distribution rights for Mamiya cameras, which are used primarily by professional photographers, Mr. Froehlich and two partners, Paul Klingenstein and Mr. Lederman, formed the Mamiya America Corporation. It was later renamed the MAC Group.

Born Hans Froehlich in Rottweil, Germany, on Aug. 7, 1922, Mr. Froehlich was one of three sons of Nathan and Elise Raphael Froehlich. .

As a teenager, Mr. Froehlich first worked in his father’s shoe store. After his father was taken to a concentration camp (and never heard from again), Mr. Froehlich worked as a paper hanger and then as a mattress maker. Eventually, he was fired because he was Jewish. The family emigrated to the United States in 1940.

In Philadelphia, Mr. Froehlich got a job as an assembler for a photo equipment company.

He is survived by his wife of 57 years, the former Marian Puro; a son, Peter, of Silver Spring, Md.; a daughter, Carol Froehlich-Hull of New Rochelle, N.Y.; three grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

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