[mobilene]

DX coding was a clever solution for sure. As a longtime camera collector and film photographer, however, I shake my fist at manufacturers who made cameras that could read only a few DX codes, e.g., 100 and 400, and for films with other DX codes would set the camera to ISO 25 or something useless like that with no way to manually adjust ISO on the camera.

[kelnos]

The video talks a bit about that; some cameras saved on cost by only reading one or two of the "patches", and would set a "close enough" ISO.

In practice (at least the video claims), this often shouldn't be a big deal, as most film is tolerant to the over/under-exposure you'd get by setting a few ISO levels off from the correct one. For low-end consumer cameras where you'd expect the user to only use 100-, 200-, or 400-speed film, I think that's a reasonable trade off to make. And it's a low-end camera; people who buy them are expecting some corners to be cut that might reduce quality.

Also consider that a manual selector would probably have been more expensive to integrate than adding the rest of the hardware needed to detect all possible ISO levels. So if they didn't want to even spend money on the latter, they certainly wouldn't on the former. And the kinds of people who would buy cameras like that are probably also of the kind who would forget to manually set the camera to match their film, or wouldn't even understand that they need to.

But yeah, if some of those cameras were doing "can't read, so set to ISO 25", that's just dumb.

[gerikson]

The comments about tolerance for underexposure only apply to print film, not positive film. But no self-respecting transparency shooter would bother with such a camera...