Half frame 35mm cameras questions ?

BADGER.BRAD

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In the interest of trying everything at least once I'm thinking of buying a cheap 35mm 1/2 farme camera from ebay but have a few questions, The photos will tend to be Lomo/lowfi point and press type shots, Can these be developed and scanned as standard 35mm then seperated by me (using the scanned image and pc) or is there still too much of a gap between frames? I take it if I wish to take a photo in landscape I will have to tilt the camera in affect the opposite of most standard cameras ? Does anyone know of any British made cameras failing that Russian or German will do. Many thanks all.
 
Why not go full on wierd and get a Yashica Samurai X3.0...



oh - and i thought the phrase was "Try everything at least once, except incest and morris dancing" ;)
 
Olympus Pen .. from the 60's / 70's.
 
I've zero experience of having half frame processed for me, but I assume that with double the number of frames there will be some mark up for scanning. I'm going out to a meeting shortly, but if you need to know the spacing by the time I can reply, I'll dig out my half frame negative strips and measure them. Given the spacing between frames, a double frame will be more than 36mm wide assuming that the nominal frame size is accurate, so getting them scanned as full frame could pose problems.

The only makers I can recall are Olympus (who made many different models) and Canon (I still have a Canon Dial). Both are, of course, Japanese, not British or German.
 
I tried an Oly Pen once many years ago, and it took forever to get through the 72 shots. That doesn't seem like much in the digi age, but them was more considered photos. Don't know what you are using for scanning, but flatbed 35mm film holders generally allow you to crop in on whatever size the negative is, so that would be the cheapest way if you have one already?
 
I'm not sure about British and German but I've heard good things about the Russian FED Micron. That would be a cheap way to try it out.

As others have said your best bet would probably be the highly regarded Olympus Pen series.
 
I'm going to have a go with my existing scanner over the weekend and see if I can scan some negatives, Unfortunately it's not designed for scanning negs/slides so I'm going to have to fudge it ,I'm not expecting much but it would make the idea much more viable if I can get it to work.

Thanks all
 
I did have some success with scanning some 6*9 black and white negatives using the scanner in my printer. It worked surprisingly well, and inverting with GIMP was... achievable. I suspect without the light source behind they are well down on contrast, and I think colour films would be much trickier (that darn orange mask), but it's doable as a temporary measure.

There's also the "digital camera as scanner" approach... main issues there being to get the camera perfectly parallel with the negatives (often illuminated by an iPad as a light table).
 
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