Kodak Ektralite 10: (Almost) Another Spy

The perfect spy camera…if we were like Andre The Giant.

Seeing how a few of the latest reviews were about 110mm film cameras, I´ve decided to talk about mine. Just arrived from 1978… (drumroll, please) Kodak Ektralite 10 (Ta-Dah!).

The story that took me to this camera, started shortly after I bought the Diana F+. I spent days surfing the whole website looking for entries with advice and tips that would let me take the most out of my first camera, that´s how I got to an article by ==virtuesandvices" ("120 y 220: Descubre las diferencias==":http://www.lomography.es/magazine/reviews/2010/02/01/120-y-220-descubre-las-diferencias) where she said that you could use 220 film in the Diana F+. A few months later, I was lucky to travel to Peru and Ecuador, where I never stopped looking for films in every photo store I ran into.

I, being a bit of an idiot, and with less memory than Dori, made the numbers dance and instead of asking for 220 film, I asked for 110. Because I hadn’t taken the Diana F+ on that trip, I wasn’t in a hurry to open the package and I waited until I got back to Madrid. Upon opening the first one, an initial moment of bewilderement took over my mind (that wasn’t what I thought), followed by a thousandth of a second of rage… luckily, I was then invaded by a bunch of childhood memories when being reminded of spy cameras.

When I was a kid, cameras like the qpobby were given as gifts with almost anything (like Casio watches). And I, being a kid (and crazy), had a great time with this camera pretending to be a spy. I know I used to have a cartridge… but I don’t know what happened to it (unfortunately, my parents are not hoarders like me).

I’m losing my train of thought… as time passed, and with a desire to have a lot of cameras, I was lucky, again, to travel to New York. There, on an afternoon stroll through Greenwich Village, I saw a shop window with 8 1/2 cameras, archaic telephones, dirty shirts, and a few cameras that hooked me at first sight. Among these, the Kodak Ektralite 10. With the excuse of having film for it, to the shopping bag it went.

So far, I have only shot two rolls with it (one of them at a concert ), but I can say I like it, with this huge flash that prints the subject on the wall behind them. And it doesn’t perform any bad in low light conditions (the photos were taken with expired ISO 400 film).

With regards to the camera, I have to say the camera where it comes rocks, it´s a pity I can´t find any decent pictures on the interwebs. Also, it comes with some small stickers to put your initials on the camera.

As I said on the intro, too big to be a spy camera, but I love it.

Getting to the technical details:

• Lens: 25mm f/8
• Focusing distance: from 1,50m to infinity
• Film type: 110mm
• Shutter speed: According to the manual, the camera knows what type is loaded and changes the speed accordingly:
  • 1/210 sec for ISO 200 and more
  • 1/125 sec for ISO lower than 125
• Flash:
  • Battery: 2 AA
  • Range: 4.50m
  • Loading time: 7 seconds
  • Speed 1/1000 sec

Regards!

written by jodidopanki on 2011-11-14 #gear #antique #review #camera #vintage #spy #110-film #lomography #kodak #user-review #ektralite Share Article