My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 100. By the time I got the camera in 1978, it had been on the market for 15 years. It used Kodak 126 film and peanut flash bulbs. By this time flash cubes had already come on the market. I got the camera for an achievement on my Cub Scout Bear badge on photography. My first pictures were with black & white film of the backyard. For my badge I had specific tasks that were designed to teach about light, shadows, and framing. Photography was a very expensive hobby. Every time you clicked the shutter you were spending money, both for the film cartridges and for the development. The designation 126 implied a film size of 26x26mm. In reality the film was 28x28mm. We won’t let facts get in the way of marketing.
Kodak 126 was remarkable. The relatively large negative produced images that you could print and enlarge. It came enclosed in a cartridge so that you never had to touch or rewind the film. Years later in 1982, my brother got a Disc camera with a 10x12mm negative, not even a quarter of the image size. The Kodak 110 cartridges used a 13x17mm film. Even at that age I realized the image quality differences.
The camera had fixed focus, aperture, and shutter speed (1/90th of a second). The flash was a little pop-up contraption where you put the peanut bulb in. Assuming the bulb went off you were left with a scalding hot piece of glass to discard. This also added to the cost calculation.
I still have several of my pictures that I took with that camera. I must have drove my parents crazy with the film and development costs. I remember going to K-Mart all the way back to the photo department. You’d take your film cartridge and put it in an envelope. You had to decide if you wanted double prints of everything, without knowing if any had turned out. Then you sealed the envelope, tore off the claim ticket, and dropped your film into the slot of a giant ballot box that would decide if your pictures were worthy. In only a week, you’d come back to the store to collect the verdict.
I remember pulling the camera out on family trips. I must have enjoyed it somewhat that my parents bought me my next camera new a few years later.
