Something historical: At the end of the seventies I had a Minolta 110 Zoom SLR camera. That was an amazing piece of camera for me: Pocket film format (!), BUT a SLR with zoom ... so, it was very flexible to use and additionally small and convenient enough for me to take it with me during strolling around or traveling. I loved it. I never wanted a bigger camera. The only limitation was to make bigger prints, but that was not very important for me. When I was picking up my pics from the shop after processing, I was often asked, how I had been able to make these fucking pics with POCKET film ... nearly nobody knew about this camera. For example, sometimes I experimented by mounting some own additional lens system in front of it in order to make pics like through a microscope - it worked quite good, because with SLR I could always see what I would get on the film. So, I was able to make some kind of "super-macro". Or I loved to make kaleidoscopic collages by using e.g. 20 prints of the same pic, and invented a technique to produce pentagonal or octagonal or whatevergonal collages with appropriate pentagonal or octagonal or whatevergonal frames, because you can't buy something like this ... I had a lot of creative fun with this camera. Unfortunately it was stolen during traveling in South France, about mid eighties. After that, I had no camera for about twenty years until I started again with a Canon PowerShot A70 and now, after some years, with a PowerShot A630 ... and still I don't want a bigger camera.Oh yes, that Minolta 110 zoom!! I had totally forgotten about that.
For the younger readers, "110" was a very compact cassette film which Kodak had success with in the seventies, but the negative was very small, so when compact 35mm cameras arrived with better picture quality, the cassette 110 (and 126) formats died out.
And how about that Pentax 110 SLR with exchangeable lenses? That's a little beaut. I think by far the tiniest SLR camera ever made.Still, too small format for me, I want at least sharp 8x10 inches (20x25 cm).
But the modern Canon Ixus (Elph) will do that, and more!
2 comments:
Ahhh :-) That little Pentax 110 SLR brings back memories ... it was the first camera I ever had that went beyond point-and-shoot. Really wish I still had it, for curiosity / keepsake as much as anything else, but it was traded against a Monolta X700, which grew into a full Kit and was subsequently traded against Canon T90s.
Then EOS1's, and into the autofocus era, still with Canon.
THEN I need more megapixels (apparently:-) ) ... herein lies the road to madness, methinks! :-)
I sometimes regret having traded in that 110 Zoom (with the air filter, lol), it was a wonderful pocket camera. Like nowadays bridge cams: small, but efficient.
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