I find it hard to love 110 film and cameras. That tiny frame and the craptacular plastic lenses most of the cameras used never led to great results. But the Minolta Autopak 470 is one whale of a 110 camera, with a 26mm f/3.5 Rokkor lens of Tessar design, and exposure controlled by a CdS cell with shutter speeds from 2 sec. to 1/1000 sec.
I got this camera from my friend Alice’s father. He sent me all of his cameras from a lifetime of photography, great gear including a Certo Super Sport Dolly, a Yashica-D, and an Olympus OM-1. This Minolta was by far the least of his cameras, but I liked it when I shot it last time. Check out the candylike color I got on Lomography Color Tiger film on that outing. That roll yielded the sharpest 110-film images I’ve ever seen.
Today the only source of fresh 110 film is Lomography, so I bought more Color Tiger. That film’s backing paper is infuriatingly flecked with pinholes, so I protected against light leaks by sticking a square of electrical tape over the frame counter. I then dropped the cartridge and two LR44 batteries into the Autopak and carried it in my cargo-shorts pocket, sans flash attachment, on a fun long weekend with my wife. It’s so light I barely knew it was there.
There’s not much to using this camera: focus and fire. Except I frequently forgot to focus, as I usually do with zone-focus cameras. I don’t know what my mental block is. On several shots nothing was in focus.
I think the Autopak assumes that when you focus close, you want a blurred background. I deliberately focused on the sign in this shot, and everything behind it is out of focus. It’s a pleasant enough look, but I really wanted Margaret to be in focus.
When I did remember to focus I was always fazed by the scale, which places closest focus on the right and farthest on the left. That’s backwards to the way I think of focus. Some of its zone symbols are unusual, too, and I never got the hang of them. I kept having to check the focus guide on the camera’s bottom to know what to do.
Even when I focused correctly, many photos were very soft. I don’t know what went wrong, given how impressed I was with sharpness the last time I used this camera.
I was also not impressed with the quality of the scans. I didn’t say anything about it when I reviewed my Rollei A110 recently, but I was disappointed in those scans so much that I used a different (and more expensive) lab this time. I was more disappointed with these scans. Several frames entered the scanner crooked and required straightening in Photoshop. I also had to crop some of the frame mask out of every image. Perhaps poor scanning contributes some to the images’ softness.
But this is a camera review, not a lab review, and so back to the camera. The Autopak handled well in my hands, at least; my only complaint is that the winder was stiff.
To see more from this camera, check out my Minolta Autopak 470 gallery.
I don’t need any 110 cameras in my collection, especially given how expensive it is to process and scan 110 film for such meager results. The lab charged me a whopping $23! But I want to honor my friend and her father by keeping his lovely cameras. Fortunately this little Autopak 470 doesn’t take up much space.
Verdict: Keep
