In the post about my pinhole camera I told you I think, that it has film advance system I consider superior to all others I so far encountered and that I think every camera should have it. And today I’ll tell you why.
First, let’s see how it looks like again.
The box on the right has two canisters inside. Film goes from one canister to another. And that is the genius of it.
Such a design has important advantages.
Some cameras winds whole film to a spool on load and advances it back to canister when you take a shot, so the shots you take are safe in canister. That is good, but this is better – not only exposed film is safe here but unexposed portion of film is also safe. That means if camera is accidentally opened, only about one frame is ruined! You can also open camera intentionally any time.
You can for example decide to develop exposed frames whenever you want. Took 10 pictures of 36 exposure film, but want to develop it right now and not wait? No problem – advance one or two frames, open the camera, cut film, take the canister with exposed film and develop it, tape the unexposed portion into a new canister and continue shooting! Genius!
These two features alone are, for me at least, parameters of excellent design and I’m not aware of any other camera that has them. Perfect.
It is even more perfect than the medium, 35mm film, itself. Why? Notice one more property of this system – got it? – it doesn’t need film sprockets! They are just not needed for film advancing (although they comes handy for advancement counter in this particular camera). This also makes me a little bit sad, because if the film didn’t have the sprockets, we could have larger picture, with better ratio size, closer to 4:3 than is the weird 3:2 ratio. Oh, well.