As I recall, the year was 1964. I was still a teenager, but a teenager with a camera. It was just a basic fixed-lens SLR, a Nikkorex 35/2, but it made me the family expert. My mother wanted a new camera and said to me, “I don’t want one that’s foolproof. I need one that’s mother-proof!“
My solution was a Kodak Instamatic. A better-quality, basic box camera. A point-and-pray camera with a plastic 35mm f/9 Kodak lens that was quite sharp in the center, if not so sharp at the edges.
She loved it, and used it frequently until she passed away a few years later. It was expensive, at $27.50 (about $245 in today’s dollars) and I still have it. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Back in 1934, Dr August Nagel at Kodak AG in Germany invented what we now know as the standard 35mm film cartridge. It eliminated the need to load film into either Leica or Contax-style cassettes in total darkness.
This new 135 film made 35mm cameras usable for the masses – and, thus, popular. But there were many people who still found loading 35mm film awkward. And my mother was one of them.
At Kodak, Hubert Nerwin (formerly the chief designer at Zeiss Ikon) and Frank Zagara had been hard at work solving this problem. Newin's solution was a strip of 35mm film with a single perforation per frame, backed with a paper strip and tucked into a plastic cartridge that held both the feed and take-up spools.
Film speed could be set by a notch in the plastic, and the whole thing became a simple ‘open back, drop in the film and close the back' operation. Anybody could it, even my mother!
Zagara designed the camera to go with this new 126 film cartridge. It was a very basic box-style camera that took 28 x 26mm square photos.
His Instamatic 100, and its matching Kodapak 126 film, were introduced in 1963 at a retail price of $15.95, (or roughly $160 today), making it an affordable entry-level snapshot camera with the new 126 cartridge system.
This new format really did revolutionize the point-and-shoot camera market. The Instamatic 100 offered a fixed-focus 43mm f/11 acrylic lens, with shutter speeds of 1/90 second or 1/40 with flash, and sunny / flash selector made it point-and-shoot ready for anyone, much like the earlier Brownie series from Kodak.
It also featured a built-in pop-up flash for AG-1 bulbs (powered by two AAA batteries), and a compact metal-and-plastic body with wrist strap. Later models (from 1965) would feature the flashcube, while the X series (starting in 1970) used the Magicube, eliminating the battery and reducing costs even further.
All along, the Instamatics were intended for the “beginner” or “consumer” market. Four firms (Minolta, Rollei, Yashica and Zeiss Ikon) made a few high-end models, but none of them met with great success.
By 1970, Kodak had sold over 50 million Instamatic cameras! Millions more were made and sold by other companies. But the quality of the plastic cartridges was uneven, making it difficult to keep the film flat, which resulted in lower quality images – and the 126 format was almost dead by 1972.
Kodak’s last Instamatic was the X-15F, last made in 1978. Film production ended in 1999, though Ferrania (Italy) periodically made batches until 2008.
The Instamatic name was used again, in 1972, when Kodak introduced its Pocket Instamatic with more compact, "pocket-sized" cameras. Advances in finer-grained film enabled smaller 13 x 17 mm frames on 16mm-wide stock, versus 126's bulkier 28 x 28 mm on 35mm-wide film.
But similar problems with film flatness in the plastic cartridge and the lack of resolution from the very small negatives and plastic lenses meant that the 110 format was essentially dead by 1994. Kodak ended 110 film production by 2006, though Fujifilm continued color negative film until September 2009.
In the 1980s, both formats lost ground rapidly to the Japanese 35mm camera makers who offered better image quality, automated film loading (think Canon’s QL system) and fully automatic exposure control at ever-decreasing prices.
Today, collectors and enthusiasts can find both “print-it-yourself” cartridge designs (using 3D printers) or ready-made, reloadable ones from specialist retailers.
One firm, the Film Photography Project, is currently offering both black-and-white and color (Kodak Gold 200) films as “126 hand-perforated rolls in a black canister”, which you can load, in total darkness, into older or newer reloadable plastic cartridges.
Certainly neither convenient nor cheap. But doable, if you’re dedicated. And anyone using these cameras today certainly is that!
Read more of David Young's ongoing series on classic cameras, as well as his book A Brief History of Photography.
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