The image above is from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License, and is thus available for your use under the same terms.
Its author is John Nutall.
The name Nikon is derived from Nippon Kogaku, which literally means "Japan Kodak". This is not even unique; JVC, the company that came up with the VHS videotape format, is the "Japan Victor Company". Apparently, there was a time when major U.S. trademarks were not safe in Japan.
And yet, Nikon and Kodak, although both leaders in the field of photography, seem, if anything, to be opposites. Kodak is primarily focused on products for the consumer, at least in the area of cameras, (as a major film supplier, they did very much consider the needs of professionals in that part of their business) while Nikon emphasized high-end professional gear.
One example of how Kodak focused on making photography easier for the consumer was their introduction of certain new film formats.
In 1963, they introduced Instamatic cameras, which used 126 film in special cartridges, which eliminated the need to thread film and the risk of accidentally exposing it.
The film in an Instamatic cartridge was 35mm wide, but it had a backing sheet of paper with exposure numbers printed on it, as with 620 roll film or 127 roll film - and, as well, it did not have perforations on its sides either. Thus, it was basically the same kind of film as previously sold by Kodak as 828 roll film. Pictured at left is the Kodak Pony 828 camera from 1949, an example of a camera that used this film format.
When 828 film was first introduced in 1935, it had one perforation per frame, with the perforations spaced 43 mm apart to allow some space between the 40 millimetre-wide frames. The 126 film in the Instamatic cartridge also had one perforation per frame, and these were apparently spaced at a distance of 34.5 mm.
While most of the Instamatic cameras made by Kodak were simple point and shoot cameras, with fixed-focus lenses, Kodak did get around to making an SLR camera that used these 126 film cartridges, as depicted at right, and, in fact, there were also such cameras made by Ricoh, Rollei, Zeiss Ikon (under their Contaflex brand), and the Keystone K 1020 (which is, according to one web site, suspiciously similar to the Mamiya Auto-Lux 35mm SLR).
The Keystone K 1020 auto-instant SLR is of particular interest because it was the first SLR to use the 126 Instamatic cartridge from Kodak; it had a large selenium light sensor on the front of the camera. However, it did not have interchangeable lenses.
The image shown at left, from an advertisement for the Contaflex 126, by the West German firm of Zeiss Ikon, as noted (but it had also merged with Voigtländer at this time) shows how they emphasized the fact that their camera had a large assortment of interchangeable lenses available for it, bringing serious photography to the 126 cartridge.
The Kodak Instamatic Reflex used the same type of lenses as the previous Kodak Retina Reflex SLR, and thus did not opt for a focal-plane shutter. (This is not as strange as it sounds. The Kodak Instamatic Reflex camera was introduced in 1968; the Kodak Retina Reflex IV camera was sold from 1965 to 1967, so those cameras were not a long-forgotten relic of the past at the time. But there is still something strange here: if the Instamatic Reflex camera was worth making, why was the Retina Reflex discontinued: it wasn't as if 35mm film was going anywhere?) However, the conventional shutter it did have was one of the first electronic shutters to be used in a consumer camera.
The standard image size for 828 film was 40mm by 28mm, and there were only eight exposures on a roll. Since Kodak had continued to make and sell 828 film until 1985, one is tempted to ask, in order to avoid wasting film on sprocket holes, why the world's compact SLR cameras weren't made to use 828 film instead of 35mm movie film, even if the precedent of using 35mm movie film was set by the Kine Exakta?
Well, there's actually one obvious reason why not which we've already seen, the limitation to only eight exposures per roll, but if Kodak could make both 120 film and 620 film, obviously it could have sold the same kind of film as used in both 828 reels and Instamatic cartridges on reels that held 25 or 36 exposures instead of just eight.
Of course, SLR cameras using 828-style film, particularly assuming they still used the standard 828 frame size of 40mm by 28mm, would have been slightly larger: a 36mm by 24mm frame has a diagonal of about 43.266615mm, while a 40mm by 28mm frame would have a diagonal of about 48.826222mm, so a normal lens would presumably have a focal length of 56mm in that world. On the other hand, the standard frame size for 126 film, as used in the Instamatic cartridge, was 28mm by 28mm, yielding square images, perhaps more suitable for slides; here, the diagonal would have been about 39.6mm; however, the Instamatic Reflex is fitted with a 50mm lens, not, say, a 46mm lens.
Of course, had the world unfolded this way, making SLRs with full-frame sensors would have ended up a greater challenge than it already is, as the area of the sensor would have been 29.6% larger.
Changing the frame width to something shorter than 40mm in order to keep the diagonal the same as that of the 36mm by 24mm frame of 35mm film wouldn't have allowed the use of the same lenses; since the height of a picture would still be 28mm instead of 24mm, and so lenses would require a longer back focus because the height of the reflex mirror is determined by the height of the film frame, and the thickness of the camera is determined by height of the reflex mirror, as there has to be room for it to swing upwards. But the height of a picture was 28mm on the 126 film Instamatic cartridges instead; how did the Instamatic Reflex overcome this? According to Wikipedia, as I note below, Kodak cropped the frames for 126 film during processing to 26.5 mm by 26.5 mm; while this is still larger than 24mm, perhaps there was enough extra room available, and/or the resulting vignetting was so slight as not to be noticeable.
During the 1930s, Agfa had introduced the Karat film cartridge; in 1966, it was inspired by Kodak's Instamatic cartridge to bring it back, adding a mechanical indication of film speed to the cartridge, a feature the 126 cartridge also had. While a number of manufacturers offered cameras that supported the Agfa Rapid System, it did not last long, at least in the North American market.
Later, starting in 1972, the Instamatic brand name was also used for a smaller cartridge containing 110 film, and Pentax made a miniature SLR camera, the Pentax Auto 110, which used that film. This camera is shown at right. However, the interchangeable lenses were all fixed focal length lenses, which sounds incredible; however, given that the camera was so small, a lens focused at "infinity" would still bring anything at any reasonable distance into sharp focus, so that could actually have made sense.
Minolta also made an SLR built around the 110 film cartridge, the Minolta 110 Zoom. Their first version, as shown at left, looked considerably different from that by Pentax.
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The image above is from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License, and is thus available for your use under the same terms. Its author is John Nutall. |
but subsequently, with the Minolta 110 Zoom Mark II, shown at right, with a third-party auxilliary viewfinder installed in the shoe, they decided to follow Pentax and go with a design that looked like a smaller version of a 35mm SLR.
The zoom lens on this camera is not interchangeable, but it can be focused, unlike the lenses on the Pentax camera.
The 110 cartridge indicated only one of three possible film speed values, high, medium, and low, and the film speeds assigned to these apparently changed over the life of the format!
Later, Kodak went still further in this direction with the Kodak disc camera.
35mm film, as used in the Leica and most SLR cameras, had an image area of 36mm by 24mm.
126 film had a basic image area of 28mm by 28mm, although that was usually cropped somewhat during processing; Wikipedia gives the figure of 26.5mm by 26.5mm.
110 film, introduced by Kodak in 1972, had a frame size of 17mm by 13mm. Note that cropping it by a millimetre would lead to 16mm by 12mm, with the motion picture aspect ratio of 4:3. The film itself was 16mm wide, and, like 126 film, it had one perforation per frame. These perforations were apparently 26 millimetres apart, which allowed for quite a generous spacing between frames.
The image size in the Kodak disc system was 10mm by 8mm, thus larger than that of 8mm home movies at 4.8mm by 3.5mm, or even Super 8 at about 5.8mm by 4mm.
Not only that, but the small size of the frame in the Kodak disc camera system was mitigated by another factor, a recent technical innovation on the part of Kodak.
The image above, from a Kodak advertisement, shows a microphotograph of silver halide grains as modified by Kodak's T-grain process; these flat grains allowed Kodak to produce Kodacolor VR 1000 film, which, as its name suggests, had a sensitivity of ASA 1000, and they also allowed it to give Kodak disc films higher resolution to produce acceptable results with the smaller frame size. A T-grain emulsion was also used to make a version of Kodachrome with ASA 200 available.
Of course, not all film formats, only nearly all of them, were defined by Kodak. A large number of Japanese companies produced tiny cameras that used film that was 17.5 mm wide; this being half of 35 mm, so the film could easily be made from readily available 35mm film.
One such camera, the Mycro, is illustrated at right.
Similar cameras were also made that used standard 16mm film.
Of course, if one is going to talk about small cameras, it would not do to forget about the Minox. This camera used film that was 9.2 mm wide, and the image area on the film was 8 mm by 11 mm, not far from that used on the Kodak disc camera, but without the benefit of T-grain emulsions.
The image on the left shows the Minox in its open position, to allow use of the viewfinder, and the one on the right shows it in its closed position.
Before the war, Minox was produced by the company VEF in Latvia, starting from 1936. After the war, production of the Minox resumed in West Germany, by the new company Minox GmbH, founded by Walter Zapp, the original inventor of the Minox camera.
Later on, Minox branched out into making a compact and light camera that took full-frame photographs on conventional 35mm film. In fact, it made two models of this kind of camera, one of which was the Minox 35 EL shown at left.
Naturally, though, with their expertise and reputation for small cameras, they did not miss the opportunity to also make a camera using Kodak's new 110 film, the Minox 110S, shown at left.
On February 1, 1996, Kodak announced the new Advanced Photo System. This used film that was 24mm wide. The size of an image frame was 30.2mm by 16.7mm, but it could be optically indicated on the film that the desired print should instead only make use of a smaller area within that frame; two additional choices were available, 25.1mm by l6.7mm for a "classic" image in a shorter rectangle, or 30.2mm by 9.5mm for a "panoramic" image in a longer rectangle.
These sizes are known by the following abbreviations:
APS-H High Definition 30.2 mm by 16.7 mm APS-C Classic 25.1 mm by 16.7 mm APS-P Panoramic 30.2 mm by 9.5 mm
If you divide 25.1 by 16.7, the quotient is about 1.503. So the "classic" image is an attempt to match the 3:2 aspect ratio of 35mm SLRs, rather than an attempt to switch from an aspect ratio close to 3:2 to something more like the 7:6 ratio of many large format cameras, which is what I had been expecting at first.
The film speed was recorded magnetically on the film, and optionally cameras could record data magnetically on the film as well, such as an indication of how many frames had been exposed.
The life of this film format was, of course, cut short by the transition to digital photography. However, it left a mark on the era of digital phtography, as full-frame 36mm by 24mm sensors were expensive to make, many digital cameras aiming to be similar to 35mm SLRs used sensors the size of an APS-C frame instead, since that was the one which was similar to a standard 35 mm still picture frame in aspect ratio.
Even sensors of this size were still expensive, and so budget 35mm SLRs used sensors 17.6mm by 13.2mm, in the "four-thirds" size.