Scan 120 Film to Save Your Memories

‘Instamatic’ was in fact Kodak’s trademark name for their easy to load into the camera ‘126’ cartridge film cameras. These were launched way back in February 1963 and the first one was called the Instamatic 50. The thing that you learn about life over time, is that not everything has to be perfect and this basic camera proved to be a great success with millions of cameras sold across the world. 

The combined convenience of the camera being small, light and portable plus the added bonus of being easy to load up (35mm cameras were a little more fiddly)  was great. Now people could safely load their home cameras with no risk at all of fogging their precious film.

By 1970, the core concept was a huge immediate success. Over  50 million Instamatic cameras were produced!

When these ‘Instamatics’ were introduced, different kinds of kodak instamatic 126 film could also be purchased – for example for colour prints or slides (otherwise known as transparencies) Eventually and generally, the 126 format was discontinued circa 1998. 

You may also be interested to know that 126 slides are an extremely common type of slide that we scan at Supaphoto. Back in the day, you might have chosen to buy 126 slide films in an easy to load cartridge. Why would you have done this?

Well, for a start, convenience of viewing I guess. Once developed, you could insert the slides into your slide projector and watch them magically appear one by one with your children by your feet looking wondrously at the screen or wall. They were produced by putting the 126 film into a normal-sized slide mount – either cardboard or plastic. 126 slides images, unless 35mm slides are easy to recognise since they are square and smaller. 

In the early days, you probably had a slide projector where you had to move the images forward one by one. It would have been quite laborious but it didn’t matter in an age where you weren’t pressed for time and distracted by social media.

While we also digitise 126 negatives, the film used in 126 slides is colour positive. Hold your slide film up to the light, and it’ll look just like whatever was photographed.

In 1972, and following the groundbreaking financial success of these 126 Instamatic cameras, the 110 cartridge was then released in 1972. You could choose between black & white and colour print cartridges again. 

So you may very well ask yourself. Why did they create a different version of the first instamatic? Well, it was thought that a better quality image could be produced using 16mm film once developed and enlarged. Again, this advancement led to another whopping 25 million cameras being sold within a few years.