CLASSIC FILM CAMERAS
How half-frame cameras double your picture power. John Wade is your guide
Let’s face it, film photography is expensive these days: about a fiver for a roll of black & white, double that and more for colour print and over 25 quid for a roll of colour slide film. Why do we bother? Perhaps it’s because we love the feel and operation of old film cameras. Maybe it’s the different look of a colour slide or a film-produced print compared to a digital image. Possibly, it’s comparable to the current upturn of interest in vinyl in the music world. Whichever way you look at it, those who still enjoy film photography are hooked – and getting poorer by the day. So how about a way to halve film costs? The answer is to use a 35mm half-frame camera.
Abit of history
Although there were 35mm cameras before 1925, it was the first Leica launched that year that really made 35mm viable as a usable film format. Previously, 35mm had been used in the cine world where the film was run vertically through movie cameras and projectors with a frame size of 18x24mm. When Leica designer Oskar Barnack conceived his new type of still photography camera, he adopted 35mm cine film for it, but ran the film through the camera horizontally and doubled the frame size to 24x36mm. Thus was born the standard 35mm format, still used in full-frame digital cameras today. When half-frame cameras came along, they halved the size again and reverted to the 18x24mm format, producing 72 exposures on a normal 36-exposure roll of film.
As far back as 1927, half-frame was used in the Ansco Memo camera, and continued in 1945 with the Universal Camera Corporation’s Mercury II. They were both American cameras. But it was Olympus in Japan who really kick-started the craze with the introduction of the first Pen camera, and other Japanese manufacturers were quick to jump on the bandwagon. Here’s a selection of half-frame models that are still usable today.
Olympus Pen
LAUNCHED: 1959
GUIDE PRICE: £40-60
When camera designer Yoshihisa Maitani (the man behind the Olympus OM-1 and Olympus XA) suggested the half-frame format to Olympus, the firm wasn’t convinced it would be successful. So rather than tool up to produce the camera itself, the company outsourced production to subcontractor Sanko-Shoji. When the camera’s popularity became clear the firm brought production back in-house.
Measuring just 10x6.5x4cm – at the time one of the smallest models made to take a full-size 35mm cassette – the camera was claimed to be as easy to carry as a pen. Hence its name. The original Pen is entirely manual. It uses a Zuiko 28mm f/3.5 lens that stops down to f/22 us
