On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Skip Williams wrote:
<SNIP>
> - 126 (drop-in for instamatics)
> - Agfa rapid (how long did that last?)
> - 16mm (Minox and Russian cameras for the Mission Impossible! crowd)
Hey! I still use those in my two minox'es when I'm photographing
government secr... - ehhm uhmm, ahh - secretaries on my various trips to
different countries ;) ;)
Actually, I think the minox'es makes 8x11mm negatives, so the films are
closer to 9.5mm than to 16mm. They also come in nifty 110-like packages
(only much smaller). However, it is getting hard to find good
(i.e. fine-grained) films these days: minox are selling "minopan" (Agfa
film, really) only at 100 and 400 ASA. Makes for grainy enlargements....so
I've found a new use for the darkroom: cutting up 35mm rolls of Ilford
PanF into 9.5 mm wide slits.......
An interresting aspect of the Minox'es is that it's possible (if loosing
one frame is acceptable) and even easy to change film in the middle of a
roll (yes, if you want to take 8x11mm slides, for some reason). That
should reduce the need for multiple cameras. Of course, as we all know,
that doesn't work.... (cool cameras, btw: I've got all sorts of "Weird spy
equipment" for my minox'es: a tripod, where the camera is facing downwards
to copy doccuments, e.g.).
> - 110 (Ha! What a dumb idea.)
> - Disk (Double Ha! An even stupider, Kodak brain fart!)
> - APS (Half-frame for the 90's, which will probably be GONE by 2010,
> surpassed by 35mm P&S and Digital)
I like your very objective and unemotional walk-through of the film
formats. ;) You have to admit, though, that some of them were amazing...if
for northing else than for the fact that people actually bought into it:
take the disks, which were effectively "combining the poor quality of the
minox-small negatives with the inconveniences of a large camera and the
resolution of a coke-bottle lens" ;)
>
> As for Olympus' Half-Frame line, it continued into the early 70's. I find
> references to the Pen EED made in 1981, but it was a product past it's prime
> by then. Olympus really stopped most of it's half-frames by 1972 when the
> OM's were introduced.
Actually (now comes the Olympus-content...), I've been wondering exactly
how small the Pen-series is compared to the OM-series. Sometimes
even an OM is a little "on the big side" to carry around, and while I
could use the abovementioned Minox, the effects of a tiny tiny film makes
it less attractive. The modern p&s cameras do not attract me, so I was
considering the Leica M6 - until I saw the price tag, at which point I
began to look at the Pen series...However pen's are few and far in
between, and I assume that a good quality Pen FT would cost an arm and a
leg?
--thomas
(who is so close to drifting off-topic here)
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