point and shoot – Cheap Camera Adventures

A few days ago, found an old Olympus Trip junior and decided to try it out. The Olympus Trip Junior is probably the cheapest and simplest camera I have ever used on this blog, I payed the equivalent of about 2 euros for it in so-called unknown condition. My test before buying it was putting batteries in it and listen for the advance and shutter if they both worked. They did and I bought ut.

The Olympus Trip Junior is a very simple camera. It is a point and shoot camera with a fixed focal length of 33mm and a shutter button. It also has a flash and three different ISO-settings 100, 200 and 400 ISO. From my first experiment with this camera the exposures were a bit inconsistent so I am not sure whether the ISO markings are mainly aimed at the flash or if it does indeed have different shutter speeds or apertures. Not having been able to find any manuals for this camera, my guess is that it has a fixed aperture of about f8 or f11 focusing at about 4 meters, and that it has one shutter speed of about 1/80. These are just my guesses, and should not be taken as facts.

My Olympus Trip Junior from this outing.

For my first trip with this camera, I chose to do something along the lines of my most recent project, stopping at locations I usually drive past. Now, I have shot many shoots at the old abandoned train station at Fall in Søndre Land in Norway, however, this abandoned piece of railway has more stations and even a walking path along it. So this time, I went to a different station that I have previously never seen. Trevatn. Not knowing how well the camera worked or how indeed it worked, I decided to go with a film of about 200 ISO. Ilford FP4 shot at 200. I chose this because I just guessed that if it was such at a setting it would likely be at 200, as it was the most popular film speed for hobby users when the camera was new.

Approaching Trevatn Station – Olympus Trip Junior – Ilford FP4+ @200 – Adox FX39 II 1+9

Since I was uncertain how this film would turn out, and if the exposures would be correct, I decided to play it safe and slightly over-develop. I found a time of 7 minutes 30 for FP4+ at 200 on the massive dev chart, and I chose to not make any corrections for it when using a rotary processor. This means that the film was likely pushed to about 320 if not 400 ISO in development. I chose to use Adox FX39 II as my developer as this is a developer I have found to like quite a lot lately. I like how it looks with FP4 as you can see here.

Overall, I think the images turned out very well. I expected the camera to give some severe light leaks, but I couldn’t find any traces of leaking at all. This surprises me, as the film door seemed rather flimsy. But somehow, the light seals must be very good. even when the door isn’t firm.

The lens does what I would expect a point and shoot lens to do, It gives a reasonably sharp image with a bit of character to it. I find it quite good and very much enjoyable to play with. I might bring this camera along with me on some trips in the future just to do some happy-snapping.

The images are camera scanned using the Valoi easy 35-system and a Fujifilm X-T3 camera.

The market for film cameras has changed substantially over the last two-three decades. In the 90s there were a range of very simple easy cameras that you could use to get some pictures without knowing anything about photography nor wanting to learn about it. They were simple, fully automatic and would give you acceptable images with minimum effort. These were the fully automatic point and shoot cameras. They’d set the film speed through DX coding on the cassette, they would set the aperture and shutter speed accordingly. The small catch, you had to press the shutter release button yourself. The bigger catch, you had no idea what the images would look like.

This morning, I played around with one of these cameras. I haven’t used one of them for a long time, and I was curious about what it would «bring to the table» of images and quality. The camera was bought cheaply online and arrived by Norwegian snail mail two weeks after it was posted from a town reasonably nearby. Well done Snail Mail. After this wait, I was the confused owner of a Chinon Pocket Zoom AF.

The Chinon Pocket-Zoom AF – 38-60mm lens (probably f8 or something like that as widest aperture)

I was eager to test it out, and I gave it a roll of Rollei Retro 400s. The electronic and automatic wind-on mechanism did its job and rolled on a few frames that could have been used, and the display on the back showed «1». The Chinon was ready. I went out in very dull weather and the Chinon did not seem to be too fond of dull and «boring» light. It constantly set off the flash, and I had to manually reset it to «flash off» every time I changed compositions, as it would have reverted to flash mode automatically. It is a bit like an overbearing parent, the security net is always there.

Reklamer

Shooting the Chinon was like shooting with your phone. You aim vaguely in the direction of what you want to photograph, you press the shutter button and wait for a while while the small elves inside the camera gets to work setting up your exposure. This takes a while, and you would probably not use this camera to photograph running animals or people in action. If you used it to photograph someone playing football, they would be done with their game and home for dinner before the camera takes a shot. After a while, when you hear the reassuring sound of the shutter and the winding mechanism, you are ready for your next shot.

Chinon Pocket Zoom AF – Rollei Retro 400s – Xtol Stock

When looking at the final images, they are not that sharp and crisp as you would hope. But since I have not had any control in the making of there images other than pressing the shutter release button, I don’t really feel it is my fault.

Some issues I see. The lens is probably not that bright and certainly not very sharp, and the images seem all slightly under exposed. They have a strange vignetting, much like the one you get while shooting a Holga camera, and the lens perfomance isn’t that much better on this Chinon. Also, you get these imprinted numbers on all your frames, and I was not aware that it would be printing numbers on my frames. I have left them here in all their atrociousness.

My conclusion. I will sell this camera to someone who will use it. I will certainly not use this camera again and if anyone wants it, please contact me.

Stikkord: point and shoot

A trip with Trip junior

Playing with a Point and Shoot