Kodak Instamatic

A camera built around a mistake people kept making

Kodak's market research in the early 1950s found that much of the public was not buying cameras, or not using the ones they owned, because loading roll film and setting exposure felt like something that could go wrong. Work on a remedy began under the name Project Easy Load and was later renamed Project 13. The brief was a camera that was foolproof, reliable and cheap enough to sell to people who had never owned one. A. D. Johnson, Kodak's advertising manager, is credited with coining the name Instamatic, a contraction of instant and automatic.

The first model was the Instamatic 50, released in the United Kingdom in February 1963. The first model sold in the United States, roughly a month later, was the Instamatic 100. It had a fixed aperture, fixed focus and a single 1/90 second shutter, plus a flashgun for single-use AG-1 peanut bulbs. Early Instamatics went on sale for about $16. Nothing on the camera invited adjustment, which was the point.

The cartridge did the engineering

The heart of the system was the Kodapak 126 cartridge. Film 35 mm wide, backed with paper, sat coiled inside a plastic shell that carried its own take-up spool. The user dropped the cartridge into an open back, closed it, and wound on. There was no threading, no rewinding, and only one way to fit it. The film was unperforated except for one registration hole per frame, which a sensing pin dropped into to lock the wind-on lever.

The format produced a 28 x 28 mm negative with an image area of 26.5 mm square, which is where the number 126 came from. The square frame meant the camera never had to be turned on its side for a portrait. Better still for Kodak's accountants, the cartridge carried the film backing plate and the exposure counter, removing two precision parts from every camera body.

A price ladder with one moving dial

Kodak expanded the range quickly through 1963. The 300 added a light meter, the 400 added a light meter and a spring-driven film advance, and the 700 added adjustable focus and shutter speeds behind a 38 mm f/2.8 lens. The last digit of a model number told the buyer which flash it took: a zero meant a built-in flashgun, a four, from 1965, meant a socket for a four-shot flashcube, an X marked the battery-free Magicube models of 1970, and an F the Flipflash bodies from 1976.

At the top of the amateur line, the 800 and 804 offered a rangefinder, a selenium meter and clockwork winding. Above that sat the Instamatic Reflex of 1969, a German-built single-lens reflex that accepted Schneider-Kreuznach lenses on the Retina mount. Kodak was selling simplicity at the bottom of the market and legitimacy at the top, off the same piece of film.

The processing trade had to be rebuilt

The drop-in cartridge was so easy to use that film consumption rose sharply, and photofinishers could not handle the flood of Kodapak cartridges through their existing lines. Film lengths were spliced together and pushed through the continuous developing machinery already used for motion picture film. High-volume photofinishing dates from that scramble.

Kodak supplied 126 film in black and white as Verichrome Pan at ISO 125, in colour transparency as Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome 64, and in colour negative as Kodacolor-X, rated at ISO 64 and later 80. Notches on the cartridge told metering cameras the film speed; for the fixed-exposure bodies, the wide latitude of colour negative film covered the difference.

Everyone else built one too

Kodak licensed the format, and Canon, Olympus, Minolta, Ricoh, Zeiss Ikon and even Rollei built 126 cameras of their own. Some were far beyond anything Kodak sold under the name: the Rollei SL26 had interchangeable 28 mm, 40 mm and 80 mm lenses, through-the-lens metering and a rangefinder, and retailed for around $300.

Sales figures vary with the source, but the direction does not. Wikipedia records more than 50 million Instamatic cameras produced between 1963 and 1970, while Camera-wiki puts the total near 60 million by 1976. Kodak also gave quantities away in a joint promotion with Scott paper towels in the early 1970s, to create a generation of film buyers. By then the brand name had slipped into the language as a general term for any inexpensive point-and-shoot.

The smaller sequel and the long fade

In 1972 Kodak repeated the trick at a smaller size with the Pocket Instamatic and the 110 cartridge, launched in the United States in five models from the 20 to the 60. The top model had a stainless steel body and a 26 mm f/2.7 Ektar lens; the 20 had a fixed-focus 25 mm lens and one shutter speed. More than 25 million Pocket Instamatics were made in under three years, though the 13 x 17 mm negative ran out of detail once prints went past postcard size.

The X-15F was the last Instamatic sold in the United States, staying on sale until 1988. Kodak stopped coating 126 film in 1999, and Ferrania in Italy kept making it until 2008.

What survived

The look outlived the hardware. Hipstamatic, released for the iPhone in 2009, borrowed the Instamatic's body shape for its interface, and the filters that made Instagram famous were built to imitate the colour of square-format snapshots from cameras like this one. The square frame and simple geometry of the 126 bodies fed directly into the redesigned Instagram logo. Kodak's 1888 promise, you press the button, we do the rest, had finally become literally true in 1963, and the habit of photographing ordinary days rather than occasions is the part of the Instamatic that never went away.