My dad had to be in a mighty good mood before he’d spend money on non-essentials. He must have been in a fabulous mood that summer day in 1977 when, on a quick trip to Kmart, he bought me this Imperial Magimatic X50 camera. It must have cost him a whole $10, an outlandish sum for an avowed tightwad!

Image credit: Pacific Rim Camera, https://www.pacificrimcamera.com/

I assume that the Imperial Camera Company manufactured X50s in its Chicago factory as they are all stamped “Made in USA.” This all-mechanical camera takes 126 film cartridges and pin-fired Magicube flash cubes. It’s made of plastic except for a few pot-metal parts, like the pin that catches the film sprocket during winding and the pin that fires those Magicubes. The lens is certainly plastic too. According to camera-wiki.org (here), the lens aperture is about f/5.6 and the shutter operates at about 1/100 second. This strikes a good compromise between outdoor and flash shots, allowing both to be well enough exposed and in focus across a reasonable depth of field.

I’ve seen this camera with “Concept 126” above the lens where “Magimatic” normally is.

By the way, if you like 126 cameras you might also like my reviews of two 110 cameras, the Rollei A110 (here) and the Minolta Autopak 470 (here). Or check out all of my camera reviews here.

My X50 came in a box with a 126 film cartridge and one Magicube, so I made photographs that very day. We spent it at my grandparents’ home on a small lake in southwestern Michigan. I made some photos of my grandmother that I’m very happy to have now. See a couple of them here.

I will always wish, however, that those photos weren’t so blurry. The X50’s shutter button is super stiff and hard to fire, leading to camera shake that obscured the details of my recorded childhood memories. This is Phil, a boy in our neighborhood, and my brother Rick in our driveway. More than forty years on I recall Phil’s blonde mop top and his unbounded energy and enthusiasm, but I can no longer call up the details of his face. I wish my photos of him were some help.

This is Betty, my family’s next-door neighbor for 35 years. She’s holding her own 126 camera, a Kodak Instamatic. It seemed like everybody had cameras that took 126 film in the 1970s and early 1980s. The vast majority of those cameras, like my X50 or Betty’s Instamatic, had no settings to fuss with.

It’s a little hard to tell through the camera shake, but the X50’s lens was reasonably sharp from edge to edge with little distortion. I see no vignetting.

The X50 wasn’t my first camera; a garage-sale Kodak Brownie was. After I got the X50 I never shot that Brownie again. I always struggled to load the 127 rollfilm into that Brownie. There was nothing to loading 126 film into the X50: insert the cartridge and close the door. And thanks to Magicubes I could easily take photos inside with the X50. The Brownie could take flash photos too using AG-1 flashbulbs, but they were too hot to handle after firing. They also required two AA batteries, which I had to buy myself; every penny counted when I was this age. Here’s a flash photo someone took of me at Christmas in 1977.

Magicubes lit scenes fairly evenly. Here are my grandparents at home in the summer of 1981.

Here’s our family dog Missy, posing patiently in 1981. The closer you were to your subject, the more likely the flash would reflect.

I made my last photos with the X50 in 1983. By this time I had learned to squeeze that shutter button with utmost care to eliminate shake. Here are my parents on my mom’s birthday that December. I’m eight and 12 years older now than they were then.

That shutter squeeze was so long and slow that it made the X50 no fun to use. By this time I had collected dozens of old cameras, so I tried a few of them trying to find something I liked better: a Kodak Duaflex II, an Argus A-Four, a Kodak Brownie Starmatic, and even a Kodak EK4 instant camera.

I suppose my dissatisfaction with the X50 led to a lifetime of trying old cameras. It is as if I was on a quest for the perfect camera. After more than 40 years I’ve figured out that no such camera exists. It’s great fun to keep trying anyway.

My Magimatic X50 is long gone and I don’t miss it. But I’m so happy I have all the photos I made as a kid. As blurry as they are, they anchor my childhood memories.

If you like old film cameras, check out all of my reviews here!
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Comments

26 responses to “Imperial Magimatic X50”

  1. retrocrank Avatar

    JIm,
    Isn’t it cool how nearly any camera can make pretty sweet pictures. Right there are the parts of your past you found valuable, with better resolution than most memories. Great pic of your parents.

    The driveway shot – another bit of the past. The image is a little fuzzy, but I think I pick up enough details to see that’s a ’68 or ’69 blaze orange MGBGT in the red house’s driveway, and what a cool driveway it is. If you don’t need A/C and you can do your own maintenance work, an MGBGT is an awfully nice road trip car. I’ve explored many of the backroads of southern IN, OH, and western WV/PA in mine (including a memorable trip over the Hogsback Road on my way to visit Story IN – it was a Springtime trip and the roads in the surrounding valleys/plains were flooded). Nice ones can be had for relatively cheap, they’re easy to maintain (parts are all still available), and as long as you don’t show it to the salty winty roads, they’ll last forever.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      That MGBGT was a fixture in our neighborhood. I kind of miss the time when cars like that were still fairly common!

    2. retrocrank Avatar

      Looking at it on a much bigger screen on my work computer, I believe I was in error about the MGBGT – those bumper overriders look like they’ve got rubber inserts, and black-background insignia on the tailgate mark it as probably a ’72. Pretty much the same thing as the ’68/’69s though, just with a glovebox instead of a big “safety pillow” in front of the right front seat and some additional anti-pollution gewgaws on the engine….

      1. Jim Grey Avatar

        Thanks for narrowing down the year!

  2. J P Avatar

    My first camera was a Kodak 104 that I probably got for Christmas in maybe 1966. Mine did not suffer from the funky button and took pretty good pictures. And Flashcubes! Boy do I remember Flashcubes. Are they still made? I’m betting no.

    The blur is maddening in trying to ID the 1920s car in the photo with the MG. My first instinct is Studebaker with you growing up in South Bend and all, but there were so many choices in the late 20s an not much useful detail.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      “The blur is maddening.” Yep, that sums up my experience with this camera.

    2. N.S. Palmer Avatar

      I was thinking early 1930s for the car, but I’m not good at identifying cars.

      1. Jim Grey Avatar

        Yeah, or late 20s. Somewhere in there.

  3. bodegabayf2 Avatar

    I don’t recall the type of 126 camera our family had, probably a Kodak, but lots and lots of our family snapshots had some degree of blur. For as easy and foolproof as these cameras were, it’s interesting that manufacturers didn’t come up with a smoother way of tripping the shutter.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      I owned a few other 126 cameras, all from Kodak, in my early collection. While I never put film through them to know for sure, their shutter buttons were smoother and would probably have resulted in fewer shake-ridden shots. The shutter button on that X50 was really a monster.

  4. DougD Avatar
    DougD

    Hadn’t thought about magic cubes in such a long time. Of course you can still buy them on ebay.

    Good times in the 70’s… And bad cameras

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      If you stuck to Kodak you probably got something decent. It was these second-tier manufacturers that you really needed to stay away from.

  5. N.S. Palmer Avatar

    Really nice pictures, but too bad about the blurriness. It looks like you eventually got the trick of using the camera, because some of the photos don’t seem blurred. As for the camera itself, it looks simple and plain, but has a certain unassuming charm.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      I was fortunate to have the camera at all, but yeah, it’s a shame that so many of my photos didn’t turn out crisp.

  6. Doug Anderson Avatar

    I suspect that at least part of the reason for the long shutter button travel in cameras with Magicube flash is the mechanical arrangement needed for the shutter button to fire the flash.

    I have the same difficulty with cameras that lock the exposure with half a button press and require a harder press to actually operate the shutter.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      You know, I never thought of that! I’ll bet you’re right. I wonder if it all just needed better lubrication.

  7. Sam Avatar

    Hi Jim I dig these images even the ones with the shakes. True portrait of Americana! Great flashback post!

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      Thanks Sam!

  8. Stuart Templeton Avatar

    I’ve no idea what camera my parents had but I do remember 126 and those flashcubes – the first cameras I ever used. I think we must have had a few like that thinking about it.
    Really cool that you still have some images from them Jim – even with a bit of camera shake.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      I still have almost all of my negatives from that camera. The only ones I can’t find are from a vacation my brother and I took with my grandparents. I’m happy the negatives have survived the years.

      1. Stuart Templeton Avatar

        Says a lot about the long term life of negatives! I’m not so sure about all the jpegs I have now – Will they still be around in 20 – 30 years I wonder?

        1. Jim Grey Avatar

          I keep hearing that our digital image file formats are a ticket straight to obsolescence, but the jpeg has been around since 1986. My guess is that it’ll still be with us in 2036.

          1. Stuart Templeton Avatar

            It’s as old as that? I had no idea – that gives some a fair bit of hope for the future then.

  9. Robert Avatar
    Robert

    Well I won’t make a long comment here as I mentioned my experience with this camera in your Kodak X-15 post. But again yes I had the same frustrating experience as you with the shutter and blurry photos on this thing. I did get better with it in time and believe it or not, I also shot Black and White as well as Kodachrome slide film along with the traditional color print film with this piece of plastic back then as well.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      You shot Kodachrome in one of these? Brave man!

      1. Robert Avatar
        Robert

        Yes I did. Pretty lousy results due to the low ASA. Daylight shots weren’t bad but indoor shots were way too dark even at moderate distance. They turned out the same way when I used Kodachrome in the X-15 too.

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