110 slide film

[Stephen]

Jan 26, 2013 12:07:34 GMT -5 olroy2044 said:

HEY PENTAX! ARE YOU LISTENING? ;D

The silence is deafening!

Better send the request to Ricoh, the current owner of the brand, now all Chinese made.

[olroy2044]

Better send the request to Ricoh, the current owner of the brand, now all Chinese made.

Yeah, I know One can only hope. But as long as I am fantasizing, might as well dream big---------er---ah----SMALL ;D

ol(wishful thinking!)roy

[Berndt]

Oh how I agree, it is abused, misunderstood, and used as an excuse for poor lens aberrations in the image.

Understandable. Reading all that here I thought, I might have a quick look at the Wikipedia: In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image. Bokeh has been defined as "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light".

Interesting ( and I actually didn't know ), that the origin is the japanese word "boke" and it has been adapted into English just around 1998. I was pretty certain, that it would come from French, describing a certain flavor, because it is also used for wine ... but I obviously have been wrong.

My personal image of "bokeh" is also not exactly that of the Wikipedia ( and probably also different from other peoples image then ). The depth of field or area of focus is often described and understood as a distance, where the picture is sharp and outside of this range, everything is blur.
But ... I think, that is not exactly true. Every lens shows a certain graduation from sharp to blur and this zone is the most interesting for me. Lenses, which I like, do have a soft graduation from sharp to blur ... and according to my error, that bokeh would mean something like "flavor", it described the undefinable "twilight zone" between sharp and blur.

The japanese language BTW, is full of words, you ( Stephen and Roy ) would probably hate ;D Most of them do not have a clear meaning and leave a lot of space for personal imaginations. One of them is "wabi-sabi" for example. You can check the Wikipedia for that too: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi ... but I doubt, that you will exactly understand. Nor do I, even living here for quite a while. But I know, that this is difficult to accept for people, coming from a western language. English, German ... very precise languages and we are used to communicate like that.

[camerastoomany]

"Other suggestions for a decent 110 camera ?"

The Minolta Zoom Mk II is an obvious choice, but isn't usually what I call cheap. Look also for the Canon ED20. It is the conventional 110 pocket job, held horizontally, but has a very good lens and a design which holds the film flatter than is the case with cheaper 110s.

[Deleted]

Roy: I admire your passion for the Pentax but have to disagree on it rivaling a good 35mm. There simple wasn't a large enough negative. I got the Kodak Model 60 with the Zeiss lens and manual focusing when it came out. Problem was I think the only B&W film Kodak ever produced for it was Verichrome pan. Actually a pretty decent film with a lot of latitude. But any blowup over 5x7 was pushing the envelope. Had a friend who had the Pentax and I would say it was slightly better than my camera. Problem with all 110 (and 126) cameras was the plastic film cartridge just could hold the film as flat as a pressure plate and the smaller the format to more that was a problem. Below is an available light photo shot with my Model 60 at about 1 a.m. on the morning of August 21, 1972. Our first baby girl was less than 10 minutes old at the time. I developed the film in Michrodal-X to get as good a resolution as possible.

[Doug T.]

I've had a few 110s over the years, and found an Instamatic S30 once that I loved.
Don't know what ever happened to it.
They're as rare as Hens' teeth these days.
I also had a Sedic that was very nice.

Doug

[Stephen]

The problem with 110 was the film cartridge, it had no pressure plate and the film plane focus point was inaccurate due to film being "gripped" by the edges, and had to slide as the film wound on. The play was very small, but then the negative was small, and tolerances were made worst by slack standards of assembly of the cartridge.

126 Instamatic film had been acceptable, not much worst than 35mm, and did not affect the neg much, but the drop in size to 110 made the problem about 3 to 4 times worse.

Minox had shown small negs worked fine, but under very controlled conditions, and 16mm sub miniature from Japan, worked due to the pressure plate in the cameras.

Kodak's own answer was the disc film, where the film remained flat and true, but they took the risk to further reduce the neg size and it simply did not work.

The VP film was OK, but it needed processing like Minox to get the best, and definition was poor due to the curled film. Kodak's own research showed that they depended on colour film being used to overcome the lack of definition.

The slide film really showed the problems, the Retina projector was OK, but the sharpness limited the projected size to about 3 feet across at most. At this size the image was dim as well.

Overall the 110 system caused more problems for Kodak than any other film size they ever produced. The cameras suffered from being easy to hold badly, causing camera movement, they got strange issues with head cut off, due to the sound on the cameras, (it was a complex problem due to people not liking the click and closing their eyes before exposure, which allowed the camera to move).

They simply overlooked the developing and printing industry, where the negative handing was difficult, and scratches and marks became 4 time worst than usual. Even identification of the negs for re-prints was an insurmountable problem, and led to the collapse for the D&P for 110.

This was the reason for the complex disc film identification contact sheets, but it was too late to save the idea of small negs.

Stephen.

[melek]

I shot a lot of 110, including K-64, with a Rollei A110 back in the early 1980s. I loved that little camera.

It had some plastic parts, which ended up breaking. I bought another around 2002. Still a nice little camera.

I have the Pentax 11, which is an amazing piece of gear. And also a Minolta 110 SLR, which I haven't let used. I have the flatter Minolta model and not the chunkier one.