Another one of my varied collection of cameras, it’s the…

Kodak Instamatic 25

The Kodak Instamatic film camera was introduced in 1966, in England and Spain  and remained in production until 1972.  The essence of simplicity, this camera was made for photographers who knew nothing about photography. It was ‘instant and automatic, – instamatic’ in that all you had to do was lift it, point it and shoot. It had just two settings; two shutter speeds, 1/90th second and 1/40th second, selected by a lever above the lens, shown as a sun symbol and and half-sun symbol respectively. The camera had a fixed lens with a fixed aperture. There was a hotshot for flash bulbs.

Film was the rigid cassette style 126 roll, made similar to the 110 format cassette. Again it was made for simplicity, – the cassette just slipped easily into the camera. The cassette had a small window at the back, corresponding with a similar window on the back of the camera, so that the photographer could see the number of frames used. The film, made by Kodak, in 12 and 20 exposure options, up until 1999, did not need to be rewound, – just extracted from the camera and sent off to a lab for processing.

Kodak later used the ‘Instamatic’ name on their 110 format cameras; the so-called ‘Pocket Instamatics.’