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Why did Kodak in 1933(?) design their disposable 35mm film cassettes shorter than the FILCA or Zeiss 540, which were then the industry standard


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Why did Kodak in 1933(?) design their disposable 35mm film cassettes a couple of mm shorter than the Leitz FILCA or Zeiss 540 cassettes, which were then the industry standard? Also when did Leica change the height of their film compartments to suit disposable rather than their own refillable FILCA cassettes? When they changed the body size from IIIb to IIIc? Is a felt washer at the bottom the best way to space out a disposable cassette on my various early Barnack cameras, to get correct film register? 

Wilson

 

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I understand why Kodak as a film maker first and camera maker second, designed and adopted the disposable cassette but my question was: "Why make it a different size as in theory with the incorrect film register, they are limiting their market and encouraging Leica and Contax users to keep using refillable cassettes?"

Wilson

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Leica film chambers remained "long" through the IIIf - but with the IIIf Leitz added a film guide "finger" on the baseplate that pushed the film up just in front of the rails so that a "short" cassette wouldn't drag the film down. The Ms use the short cassette, with is where the IXMOO came in. I haven't tried a FILCA in my IIIg to see if it is short or long.

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Posted (edited)

I think it is the other way round: the cassettes (FILCA etc) had to be longer to contain the film on the spool and to enable the mechanism on the bottom plate to close it before you could take out the film. The disposable cartridges - I am not sure wether Kodak or Perutz introduced them - didn‘t need and could not cope with the latter mechanism. So the outer dimensions of the cartidges had to be smaller otherwise they wouldn‘t fit. When you compare the inner part of the cassette which takes the film and compare it to the cartridge you‘ll see it has the same size. 

Here a comparison of the interior spool of a Leica cassette and a modern cartridge:

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Edited by UliWer
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The FILCA preceded the commercial cassette, so that Kodak, Perutz or maybe even Agfa could have shaped the end pieces to ensure proper register in an early Leica or Contax camera bodies but chose not to do that. I just wondered why. It would simply have been a matter of putting a deeper dish on the bottom cap. 

Wilson

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The FILCA works with all of the Barnacks* up to and including the IIIg. The IXMOO works with all of the Barnacks and with the M's up to the middle of the M6 run. The later M6's and all of the following M's lack the mechanism to open and close the IXMOO. 

There are a number of solutions using things like felt washers, O-rings, etc. to raise the preloaded cassettes (and IXMOO) in the Barnacks older than the IIIf but I don't bother. It's easy enough to crop off the sprocket holes at the bottom of the image. If I was shooting slides it would be a different story.

*In the earliest Barnacks, made before the FILCA, a small part had to be replaced with a Leica supplied part to allow the use of the FILCA. 

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Posted (edited)
vor 49 Minuten schrieb wlaidlaw:

It would simply have been a matter of putting a deeper dish on the bottom cap. 

Yes, this was a possibility and perhaps even the early Perutz cartridges (I have never seen one) were designed this way.

Perhaps Kodak already had the Retina in mind, which appeared in 1934. As far as I know the Retina was designed from the beginning not for cassettes but for cartridges, which was a main selling point for it. The smaller cartridges allowed a smaller body.

Edited by UliWer
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Posted (edited)

I don't mind the sprocket holes showing in prints and I print (darkroom) the whole negative with the margins showing.

Maybe Kodak made their cassettes a little bit smaller so that they would not jam in any smaller cameras, but then how many cameras were there that could use 35mm cassettes at that time apart from Leica, Zeiss and Kodak's own?

FILCA or IXMOO in 111c.

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Edited by Pyrogallol
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My father switched from Kodachrome to Perutzchrome in the late 1950's because he found that due to a minor alteration in the Kodak cassettes, he was often getting just the bear edge of sprocket holes showing at the bottom of the Kodachrome cardboard housed slides. This was in his IIIa. He later went back to Kodachrome with a felt washer. I punched out a whole load of felt washers a few years ago. I already had the small punch for the centre but bought a cheap large one for the outside from China. Worked just fine on felt. Now where did I ever so carefully put them away? 

I assume the development of the commercial disposable cassette by Kodak, was simultaneous with their development of the Retina 1, so they could have bought FILCA or Zeiss 540 cassettes to look at the dimensions. Agfa were rather later to the game, not issuing their first 35mm camera until 1937, which I believe was proprietary refillable cassettes only, with Agfa not changing to commercial cassettes until 1948. 

My grandfather and my great uncle apparently just could not cope with the FILCA cassettes for their Model II and Model III respectively during the 1930s, being used to paper backed roll film. So my father who still lived with my grandfather at that time, used to load a batch of them for each one, hence in the light tight drawer in our darkroom, there were loads of FILCA's. I only have three out the probably 10 that were there. 

Wilson

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3 hours ago, UliWer said:

Yes, this was a possibility and perhaps even the early Perutz cartridges (I have never seen one) were designed this way.

Perhaps Kodak already had the Retina in mind, which appeared in 1934. As far as I know the Retina was designed from the beginning not for cassettes but for cartridges, which was a main selling point for it. The smaller cartridges allowed a smaller body.

Could be true. However, this needs some study. The only comprehensive book I have on Nagel and the Retina is in German and written by Hartmut Thiele. If you have this book you may find the answer in there. I have used modern film cassettes in Leicas made as early as 1926 and I have had no difficulty using them. The only change I had to make with a 1926 Leica I Model A was to change the clips shown below from the one with the long tail to the one with the short tail. .

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The former is for a FILCA and the modern cassette will not fit in if this in place.

This is the FILCA from which I developed the Swiss Roll Photos which appeared on BBC, New York Times, CNN etc. It contained Perutz B+W bulk film, but the film had no details on the margins to indicate what type of Perutz film it was.

 

The whole business about the move from reusable to non reusable cassettes needs to be written up comprehensively. Whoever might do this could start by translating Thiele's book on Nagel and the Retina from German into English.

There may be other differences between FILCAs and IXMOOs, but I have not looked into them.

William 

 

 

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2 hours ago, wlaidlaw said:

Agfa were rather later to the game, not issuing their first 35mm camera until 1937, which I believe was proprietary refillable cassettes only, with Agfa not changing to commercial cassettes until 1948. 

Late to the 35mm camera game, but not to disposable 35mm cassettes, where they appear to have been the pioneers. From the August 1932 issue of the Royal Photographic Society Journal:

https://archive.rps.org/archive/volume-72/733214

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By January 1933, Leitz were describing these cassettes in the Leica II manual:

https://www.cameramanuals.org/leica_pdf/leica_model_ii.pdf

I'd assume these cassettes were the same length as the FILCA, but if anyone has one perhaps they could measure it? The Agfa cassettes seem to have been developed in collaboration with Leitz (there are cassettes labelled 'Leitz-Agfa' in this long thread, though I assume these are reloadable cassettes with a similar velvet light trap design - probably the elusive FILCA D). Curiously, despite the two companies apparently working together, Leitz found it necessary to change the design of the 'lock' to the 'V2' form illustrated above to make the Leica compatible with the Agfa cassettes. Perhaps that was the only way to make it work.

There are, incidentally, two other issues in the previous thread about Agfa cassettes I'd like to know more about. First is the claim in a post by @TomB_tx that the Leica II was initially incompatible with the standard FILCA B, lacking the mechanism to open it, so that the camera could only use cassettes with velvet light traps. The other is a note about a legal case posted by @Pyrogallol that if I'm reading it correctly (the language is a bit confusing out of context) implies Leitz were at one point prevented from making the conventional FILCA B in Germany. Are these two things perhaps connected, and is there any other information about them?

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28 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

I'd assume these cassettes were the same length as the FILCA, but if anyone has one perhaps they could measure it? 

 

I have one. Will measure tomorrow. 

Leitz did a lot of messing around with the FILCA C and then went back to the FILCA B.  See the thread on this forum which I started some years ago, FILCA A, B, C Where's D?. the D seems to be the Agfa-Leitz Cassette. 

Also see this which I found inside the front page of a delivery book in the Leica Archive. I have the translation of this somewhere. It shows that in 1931 Leitz made a lot of changes in FILCA design over a very short period, literally over a matter of weeks.

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To get to the bottom of this cassette business would require a lot of research. Leitz-Agfa started a lot of things that did not get very far, but the real defining moments were, in my view, with Nagel and the Retina. However, to establish this definitively would require a lot of time, plus access to historical resources, plus the ability to speak and understand German.

William 

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Posted (edited)

One other thing I came across in the previous thread was a link to this article about Robert Capa's D-Day negatives. It's written in such a contentious style by someone with an obvious chip on his shoulder about the usual story that it's hard to be sympathetic to the argument, whatever its merits. It also contains technical errors like an implausible description of how '435' film worked in the Leica, supposedly without a cassette and requiring no rewind! (this actually seems to be a garbled account of Kodak's daylight reload for the FILCA). But there's one thing of interest to this thread that I hadn't seen before, an illustration from a 1952 issue of Leica Photography that describes the base plate 'film pusher' familiar to IIIf and IIIg users, which (like the earlier V2 lock) could apparently be retrofitted to earlier models. Did all IIIf cameras have this out of the box, or was it introduced later in production? Listing the IIf and the IIIf here seems to imply the latter.

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Edited by Anbaric
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2 hours ago, Anbaric said:

One other thing I came across in the previous thread was a link to this article about Robert Capa's D-Day negatives. It's written in such a contentious style by someone with an obvious chip on his shoulder about the usual story that it's hard to be sympathetic to the argument, whatever its merits. It also contains technical errors like an implausible description of how '435' film worked in the Leica, supposedly without a cassette and requiring no rewind! (this actually seems to be a garbled account of Kodak's daylight reload for the FILCA). But there's one thing of interest to this thread that I hadn't seen before, an illustration from a 1952 issue of Leica Photography that describes the base plate 'film pusher' familiar to IIIf and IIIg users, which (like the earlier V2 lock) could apparently be retrofitted to earlier models. Did all IIIf cameras have this out of the box, or was it introduced later in production? Listing the IIf and the IIIf here seems to imply the latter.

It would take a repair department to modify the earlier "c" series because a channel had to be milled in the die-cast crate for the "pusher" to fit. I have one IIIf (upgraded from IIc) where the new baseplate with pusher won't fit - same with the IIIc I have.

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Some approximate numbers. The FILCA B and the Leitz-Agfa are the same height from top of spool to the bottom of the cassette c 53mm. The Leitz-Agfa body is perhaps a mm less c49mm v c50mm than that of the FILCA B, but both should fit into any Leica LTM or I Model from that era. A modern Portra  Cassette is less than 50mm from the top of the spool to the bottom of the body, but it will still work in any of my cameras from that period. I've never had to put a washer or anything like that.

William 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, willeica said:

Some approximate numbers. The FILCA B and the Leitz-Agfa are the same height from top of spool to the bottom of the cassette c 53mm. The Leitz-Agfa body is perhaps a mm less c49mm v c50mm than that of the FILCA B, but both should fit into any Leica LTM or I Model from that era. A modern Portra  Cassette is less than 50mm from the top of the spool to the bottom of the body, but it will still work in any of my cameras from that period. I've never had to put a washer or anything like that.

William

Is your Leitz-Agfa is the reloadable version? I imagine their original disposable felt trap cassette would have been the same size, but they must at some point have adopted the Kodak standard. Someone on ebay has a cassette of Agfa film dated 1936 (now that's what I call expired) 'für Leica etc. Cameras', but as it would cost me over $100 delivered I'll probably stick to HP5! Maybe I should ask the seller a question ('Could you just measure the cassette to see if it will fit in my camera?').

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