Chris Dodkin
West Coast Correspondent
My first camera
This came up the other day, so I thought I'd give the old girl an outing.
Kodak 177x Instamatic - 1977 - 126 Camera
After the old medium format Lubitel I played with as a child, this camera was super tech!
The complex exposure settings of vintage models have been replaced with just two settings - f Sunny, and f Cloudy/flash. You don't get much more idiot proof than that.
The lens is a fixed 43mm, f11 Kodar - with shutter speeds of 1/40 or 1/80, depending on the lighting setting.
Offset optical viewfinder - cheap and cheerful design.
Nice, easy to hit shutter release with a very positive clunk to it - difficult to trigger by accident!
One of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of these Instamatic models produced - the camera nevertheless feels solid - and the chrome front made it look quite tech in 1977.
Film advance was also idiot proof, and the camera would not fire unless fully wound to the next frame.
Note the film window in the rear of the case, and the flash cube port on the top - flash cubes were a retro portable flash system, giving four flashes per cube, without batteries!
[video=youtube;0eGZX_4EIEU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eGZX_4EIEU[/video]
I used this camera for years, even did some 'portrait' shots of girls!
It really was a piece of cheap cr@p by modern standards, but at the time, it was perfect for a kid to use. 126 film carts were idiot proof, and much easier to work with than 35mm. Prints were square in format, and seemed fine at the time - probably pretty soft in reality.
Great memories - amazing to see how far we've come.
This came up the other day, so I thought I'd give the old girl an outing.
Kodak 177x Instamatic - 1977 - 126 Camera
After the old medium format Lubitel I played with as a child, this camera was super tech!
The complex exposure settings of vintage models have been replaced with just two settings - f Sunny, and f Cloudy/flash. You don't get much more idiot proof than that.
The lens is a fixed 43mm, f11 Kodar - with shutter speeds of 1/40 or 1/80, depending on the lighting setting.
Offset optical viewfinder - cheap and cheerful design.
Nice, easy to hit shutter release with a very positive clunk to it - difficult to trigger by accident!
One of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of these Instamatic models produced - the camera nevertheless feels solid - and the chrome front made it look quite tech in 1977.
Film advance was also idiot proof, and the camera would not fire unless fully wound to the next frame.
Note the film window in the rear of the case, and the flash cube port on the top - flash cubes were a retro portable flash system, giving four flashes per cube, without batteries!
[video=youtube;0eGZX_4EIEU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eGZX_4EIEU[/video]
I used this camera for years, even did some 'portrait' shots of girls!
It really was a piece of cheap cr@p by modern standards, but at the time, it was perfect for a kid to use. 126 film carts were idiot proof, and much easier to work with than 35mm. Prints were square in format, and seemed fine at the time - probably pretty soft in reality.
Great memories - amazing to see how far we've come.
