[paulmd]

Real mass-market cameras for this era would have been things like the Kodak Pony line or Argus C3 (aka "the brick"), or the brownie box cameras you mentioned.

https://mikeeckman.com/2022/05/kodak-pony-135-model-c-1955/

https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Kodak_Pony_828/135

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_C3

Anyway just as a general statement, photography was a mass-market thing throughout most of the 20th century - it just wasn't the glamorous pro-tier cameras that we still remember and care about today. Kodak in particular always catered to the low-end, getting cameras in people's hands to get them using Kodak film was their bread and butter, it was very much a "give away the razor, sell the blades" at least in the low-end market.

(and they introduced 620 and 628 film with different spool sizes to try and brand-lock you to Kodak! Today some cameras can be converted, or you can clip down the rim of the spool, or rewind 120 film (in a darkroom/darkbag) onto the 620 spool. It's a little bit smaller spool which can cause problems with film spacing on "automatic" cameras, but, red-window style cameras don't care, or you can use a 620 spool on the takeup.)

In the early days it was "postcard cameras" shooting 122 film (bigger than 120!) that would be contact-printed onto postcards, typically either folding cameras or box cameras (the latter being even simpler and cheaper - brownie launched at one dollar in 1900). Later, this evolved into viewfinder cameras/point-and-shoots.

https://postcardhistory.net/2022/09/the-kodak-model-3a-postc...

https://mymodernmet.com/kodak-brownie-camera/

But if you are contact printing (effectively 1:1 enlargement - the print is the same size as the negative), or enlarging only a small amount onto a 4x6 or 5x7 print, the lens isn't that critical. Meniscus is fine, rapid rectilinear or triplet is good, tessar is premium. Similarly, when you are shooting B+W film, a vague "instant" (usually about 1/100, sometimes 1/60) shutter setting is fine... the exposure latitude will cover you even though you're not perfectly on.

And it was sensational being able to send a picture of your own family through the mail on a postcard, like you were a movie star or something! Very very popular for the time.

And even then there were models that specialized in getting relatively decent quality at minimal cost, like the Argus C3. Definitely a cost-optimized camera but I doubt you could get anything better at the prices it sold at.

Anyway, today we tend to have a survival bias about this - yes, a leica or a rolleiflex or a kodak retina or a contax was quite expensive, not a mass-market thing at all! But 90% of everything is crap, it always has been (it's equally true of PC hardware today, f.ex), and we forget about the Kodak Pony 135s and the crappy box cameras with meniscus lenses and guillotine shutters because they're crap. But those were the mass-market products of their day.

(I'm sure you know this, iirc we've interacted on photo threads before, I just like sharing. ;) But I disagree on the "photography wasn't mass market" bit, box cameras and cheapo bakelite viewfinder stuff has been a thing for a long time and it's easy to forget that with survivor bias.)

[ghaff]

Thanks for sharing.

I actually used my dad's old Pony for a time but got his German-made Kodak Retina IIIc when he went the SLR route. I had a lot of good use out of that and used it alongside my later SLR through most of college when some of the mechanisms finally wore to the point they couldn't be repaired.

>Anyway, today we tend to have a survival bias about this

Yeah, there may be cult exceptions but most of the cameras considered collectibles today were probably at least moderately expensive when they were introduced.

>But I disagree on the "photography wasn't mass market" bit

That's probably fair. Vacation snapshots were at least moderately popular. Kodak didn't get to where it is only servicing pros. Of course, it was at a whole different level than today with smartphones in everyone's pocket and the costs associated with taking a picture effectively zero. We have all become the Japanese :-)

[TMWNN]

> We have all become the Japanese :-)

The novelization of The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) has a passage that discusses a photograph taken by "a Japanese student in England with a Leica". I doubt future generations will understand the multiple jokes encoded here.

[jacquesm]

Amazing comment. How do you feel about Amazon shutting down dpreview.com?

[paulmd]

I mean what is there to say? (says the person who writes half a novel every time ;)

I don’t have any emotional attachment to DPReview in particular other than having read some reviews back in the early days, looking at Kodak point and shoots and such.

It still sucks, and Amazon did it in the most inconvenient and callous way possible. There is a huge amount of accumulated knowledge being lost, not just in the reviews themselves but also the forums. And a huge amount has bit-rotted away already, if it hasn’t been archived already it’s gone.

This is a problem all over the web. Web-1.0 forums are dying, and broadcast-style social media like reddit, twitter, or even HN (to a lesser extent) isn’t conductive to replacing it. Nobody is going to run a bunch of lens tests and then post the results in the HN comments section, and once it’s dropped off the front page it’s largely forgotten. At least usenet was archived, but, web 1.0 is largely not, and it's also more difficult to scrape or to handle after scraping.

Discord has replaced it somewhat in the sense of being smaller interest-focused communities but Discord content is not discoverable, and while that’s a benefit sometimes, it’s not a good model for “original research” and documentation. The people putting wikis in their discords are doing it wrong and that’s bad.

Youtube is also an awful medium for analytical data. Today, people would be putting these resolution tests/etc into vlogs or GN/HUB-style reviews and eventually they get deleted by google or copyright claimed/etc, plus they're low-info-density even when they're online. Video is awful, it's just that we've monetized attention and video keeps people's attention for longer.

I supremely enjoy the threaded/non-tree-based and non-gamified model of web-1.0 forums. Like discord I think it builds communities where you know the people and it’s not just about getting maximum updoots, and the threaded model is a lot easier than discussions that go fractally into tangents and smaller points many of which are repeated.

There are still a number of these interest-forums - Photrio (formerly APUG), LargeFormatForums, probably FredMiranda, MFLenses, PentaxForums, and some others. There are also some major interest forums for other hobbies of mine - HomebrewTalk, RCGroups, and others. The interest forums on SomethingAwful are actually a beacon of decorum and civility, despite the site's reputation.

But every year there’s fewer and fewer, and what is undeniable is the consolidation that is being undergone here. From many web-1.0 forums to a few, from web-1.0 forums to centralized platforms like Reddit. It’s inexorable and depressing.

It’s gonna be a dark dark day when MFLenses and LFF and Photo.Net and a few of the other biggies finally turn off the lights. A lot of content lost. The Internet Archive Project are truly doing god’s work here, they are the Foundation holding off the dark ages that google and reddit are bringing on us all. And someday someone may finally get a crack at them and the library will burn. Copyright holders would love to do it.

The only way content is safe is if you can keep it safe yourself. It's ironic that cloud everything has rotted the foundations away from 50 years of decentralized content.