Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Mini Cam

Well I'll be dipped. The little Rollei A110 actually works still! I shouldn't be surprised; it's a solidly constructed little brick that went for (if I'm converting Deutschmarks right) between $150 and $200 when they started shipping in '75. That's not a cheap toy camera.

It needs to be manually focused, and I sometimes missed. (Although it made the dogwood look ethereal on that drizzly day...)

 Oops. ("Hey, what Instagram filter is that?")

The film was current production Lomography Tiger 110 with a 2020 expiration date. Unlike some Lomography films, Tiger isn't supposed to be color-shifted. Still, a high-end 110 with a built-in meter like this one would have read the plastic tab on the 110 cassette. That tab could be used to specify "High" or "Low" speed film, but Kodak never set a standard for what was high and what was low. Most manufacturers went with 400 and 100 ISO. Some higher end companies went with 64 as the "Low" setting, since there was Kodachrome 110 slide film, once upon a time.

The Lomo Tiger is 200 ISO, and I'm betting that the cassette had the long tab, so that the camera reads it as low speed. A number of photos have that slight magenta cast you get from lightly overexposed color film.