Kodak Ektramax (1978-1981)

 By the late 1970s, Eastman Kodak Company had developed a fine grain, 400 speed, color print film and wanted a camera to promote sales of the film in the popular size 110 cartridge. The result was a manually controlled Pocket Instamatic with a fast, f/1.9 lens designed for available light photography. The Ektramax had a sophisticated lens for a consumer camera. Usually the surfaces of camera lenses form segments of spheres. The lens designer selects the types of glasses, the radii of the spherical surfaces, the thicknesses of the lenses, and the spacing between the lenses to design a lens that will make a sharp image. A fast lens with all spherical surfaces often requires six or more lens elements to produce a sharp image. To reduce the manufacturing cost of the Ektramax, Kodak decided to make one of the lens elements with a surface that was not a segment of a sphere. This reduced the lens element count from six (or more) to four and still produced a sharp image. The aspheric lens was made from acrylic plastic using new precision molding techniques. This camera had the first mass produced lens with an aspheric surface. About 500,000 lens sets for this camera were made. The Ektramax was in production from 1978 to 1981. The list price of $87.50 made it fairly expensive for a Pocket Instamatic. The lens has a focal length of 25mm. Setting the exposure control to "bright sun", "shade", "low light" or "flash" set the aperture and shutter speed to selected combinations of f/1.9, f/4 or f/8, and 1/30, 1/100, 1/125, 1/175 or 1/350 second, depending on the ASA rating of the film. The lens has a focusing scale that runs from 4 ft. to infinity. The viewfinder has a little window at the top that shows the focus zone and another little window on the right that shows the exposure control setting. The camera has a built-in electronic flash that takes two AAA batteries. The camera will take available light pictures without batteries. Size 110 film is 16mm wide and has a picture size of 13mm x 17mm. Kodak discontinued size 110 film 10 years ago. The Lomography company still sells film for 110 cameras. This camera is light and feels pretty plasticy.

Front

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Viewfinder