35mm film
For 35mm cameras, see the Category: 35mm film.
The 135 film cassette format became by far the most widely used photographic medium until the emergence of the digital camera.
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The 35mm format for film was first developed on an experimental scale in Thomas A. Edison's laboratory more than 130 years ago. Edison's associate William Dickson created devices for photographing and viewing moving images on film loops 35mm wide, for which Edison filed a patent in 1891.[1] This width originated by slitting 2.75" wide film rolls in half, and adding perforations. These rolls were supplied by the Eastman Dry Plate and film Company in Rochester, NY; however, it took several years for 35mm movie film to become a regular Kodak product.
Once cine film became widely available, it did not take long for inventors to imagine 35mm still-picture cameras which might be more easily portable than the common large-format plate cameras of the time.[2] Although the first design was patented as early as 1908, it is generally accepted that the first commercially available 35mm camera was the 1913 Tourist Multiple, made by the New Ideas Mfg. Co. of New York. This camera ran the film vertically and exposed the standard 18x24 cine frame size (equaling four sprocket holes per frame). This was soon followed by the Simplex, from New York's Multi-Speed Shutter Co.. The camera permitted a choice of either the cine frame size or the "double" frame 24 x 36mm format.
However the camera which brought the 24 x 36mm image format into much greater prominence was the Leica. Oskar Barnack built his prototype Ur-Leica in 1913-14 and had it patented. His employer Ernst Leitz always promised to bring it to the market but only launched a 25-piece pre-production series in 1923, maybe as answer on the earliest true concurrent camera model Le Furet, introduced in France in 1923. The Leica began series production with the Leica A in 1925, with the start of Germany's first interwar prosperity period. The Leica was followed by the Zeiss Contax in 1932, as well as by less expensive cameras such as the Argus A which brought 35mm shooting to a larger market that could not afford the top-quality German models.
The earliest 35mm cameras used cine film bought in bulk and loaded into the camera in the darkroom; but Leitz introduced a film cassette which could be loaded with 1.6 meters of film in the darkroom, which then could be loaded into the camera in daylight as required. Several photographic suppliers made such daylight cassettes for the user to load from bulk. By the early 1930s film manufacturers also supplied film in disposable cassettes, most notably when in 1934 Kodak created an industry standard by introducing the now-ubiquitous 135 format disposable cartridge along with their Retina cameras.
Today's 135 cassettes typically have enough film for 12, 24 or 36 frames (of standard 24 x 36mm size). 18-exposure rolls used to be available and sold as a half-length roll. Later 20-exposure rolls were once common, but 24 exposures is now the standard "short" roll. Disposable one-time-use cameras typically advertise 27 exposures, but the length is the same as typical 24 exposure rolls; there is simply less waste since the film is pre-loaded in a darkroom.
There were other, rival daylight-loading systems, but most of these were minority formats compared to 135. One modest success was the Agfa Karat system, which was introduced for the Agfa Karat cameras in 1936, and was produced until 1963. In 1964 Agfa revived the Karat 35mm cartridge system and called it Rapid, trying to compete with 135 film's mightiest rival, the type 126 Kodapak cartridge. This 35mm film system modified for drop-in loading, which boosted the market for beginners' cameras for nearly 2 decades, ultimately could not compete with the image quality delivered by common 35mm cameras.
Automated Compact cameras for type 135 cassettes soon regained market share for traditional 35mm film. Especially their motor-driven easy-load mechanism for the old 35mm film cartridge made the 126 cassette film's only advantage superfluous. The most recent, and likely last, rival to 135 was APS - which perhaps would have gained wider adoption, but didn't because it overlapped the beginning of the digital era; and when APS was introduced the market was already quite saturated with fully automatic compact cameras for 35mm film. Thus the 135 cartridge 35mm film could celebrate in 2024 its 90th birthday as the most popular film system in camera history.
Bulk backs are available for some cameras, aimed at professional use, which allow the photographer to use 100-foot lengths of film at a time, minimizing the inconvenience of having to reload the camera and miss a shot. These were used by some sports photographers, but the digital revolution has largely made bulk backs obsolete.
The frugal photographer can still buy 35mm film in 100-foot lengths and spool his own cassettes. This involves putting the roll of film into a bulk loader in complete darkness. Reloadable cassettes are then filled with film using a crank on the loader. The film is then cut and a leader cut into the tail of the loaded cassette. All this can be done in daylight, hence the loaders are called "daylight loaders".
"Miniature format"
In contrast to the plate and roll-film cameras of the early 20th century, 35mm was regarded as a "miniature format" or "Kleinbild (KB)". The term is often seen in advertising and other photographic writings from the era (such as the US magazine title Minicam), but was also used for cameras that shot the smaller frame formats onto type No. 127 film, for example the Falcon Miniature. As the quality of film stocks improved, there was a growing acceptance of 35mm for professional work; so by the 1960s the term "miniature" had essentially fallen out of use. Miniature only survives as a historical term to distinguish this class of cameras from subminiature and medium format cameras.
Notes
- ↑ History of Edison Motion Pictures at the Library of Congress American Memory Edison Project (archived)
- ↑ Early 35mm cameras by Massimo Bertacchi
