Minolta camera digital
In fact, early on, Kodak considered the 35mm negative to be too small, limiting the potential for making enlargements. It’s worth noting here that Kodak didn’t invent the 35mm format for still photography – it was Leica and Zeiss Ikon that initially popularized it with their rangefinder cameras. In one form or another, the box-type rollfilm Brownie remained in production until the end of the 1950s and the “Brownie” name was used until 1980, last appearing on a 110 format compact camera.
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Its immense success would greatly influence Kodak’s thinking over the next three-quarters of a century… the challenge always being how to build a better snapshot camera. Despite the extreme simplicity, this camera – and its immediate successors – revolutionized photography for the masses, as it was reliable and delivered excellent results for the time. The aperture was determined by the diameter of the lens and, initially, the viewfinder was a clip-on accessory. The original Brownie camera was constructed from a reinforced cardboard material with a leatherette covering, and used a single element lens with a single-speed shutter and a fixed focusing range. Hanimex recognised the value of the high volume snapshot camera market early on, and rivalled Kodak for its offerings of 110, 126, Disc, APS and 35mm point-andshoot compacts. The No.2 Brownie of 1901 introduced 120 rollfilm that yielded 12 exposures per length. It came pre-loaded with enough film for six two-and-a-quarter-inch square negatives, but a new roll only cost 12 cents. It worked, and around a quarter of a million ‘box Brownies’ were sold worldwide in the first year of production, no doubt also helped by the fact that it cost just a dollar (the equivalent of about US$28 today). A ‘brownie’ was also a mythical sprite, and this aspect of the camera’s name was used to help market it to children and adolescents – a first in the short history of photography. The next step was a much more affordable, smaller and even simpler-to-use camera, and this arrived in 1900 in the shape of a new box-type model called the Brownie, after its creator Frank Brownell, whose own factory had been building cameras for George Eastman from the very beginning.
This first rollfilm was paper-based and required a complex developing process to produce B&W negatives, so Eastman came up with the clever solution of packaging everything up into one product.Įastman continued to work on ways of making photography more accessible to the masses and the first step was rollfilm using a transparent plastic – or celluloid – base that was easier to process and, more importantly, when packaged in a light-proof cartridge, could be loaded and unloaded by the camera user.
It all started with the creation of rollfilm – to replace glass plates – by George Eastman’s fledgling company in 1885, a couple of years before he came up with the name “Kodak” (which, by the way, meant nothing he just liked the way it looked and sounded). This was where Kodak made the profits it could plough into what was, at one time, the biggest and most sophisticated R&D facility in the world.īeyond its many pioneering products, Kodak was also renowned for its engineering prowess.
The objective was always to make photography more accessible to everybody via simpler processes and smaller, more affordable cameras… which, of course, would generate increased demand for film and printing materials. At the height of its powers, Kodak was the inventor and innovator that shaped several aspects of photography for both amateurs and professionals.