Agfa Family

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Agfa Family was a Super 8 camera system from Agfa , with which one could film as well as take photos. It is considered a prime example of a product that was brought onto the market contrary to customer requirements.

prehistory

Market situation

Cameras for the Super 8 system became increasingly difficult to sell in the second half of the 1970s. The reason for this lay in the new video cameras, which have not yet found a significant number of customers, but made it clear that the cine film will have no future. In 1980 the photo dealers hardly sold any film cameras, two years later most of them gave up this product segment.

Agfa considerations

The products of the Agfa Camerawerk Munich have always been created primarily with the aim of increasing film sales. And so the idea came up to combine photography and filming and thus bring a new type of camera onto the market. There were two buttons for this, one for filming and one for taking pictures, "... so that your film stands and goes", as the advertising said. If you used the latter button, the camera exposed a single image and also a mark in the edge of the film. The marking was later used during the demonstration to stop the film transport for a single image. This process had been known for a long time and used by various manufacturers, but it did not become too well known, so that it could be offered as a novelty at Photokina 1980.

The family system

camera

So that the combination of camera and projector could be offered for a list price of DM 498, the camera alone could only cost DM 149. This in turn allowed only a very simple design, with a light meter but without a zoom lens. The latter was already a significant limitation, because changing the focal length had long been part of the standard of every film, even in the amateur field. Apart from the orange-red button for taking photos and the black button for filming, there were no other controls: The Movaron f / 1.5 with 10 mm focal length was a fixed focus lens that could be used from a distance of 0.8 m, and the film speed was lower also do not vary, the camera worked with the usual 18 frames / s. The exposure time was always 1 ⁄ 30 s, even in single image mode, so that these images could be blurred easily. There was no cable release connection. Two mignon cells plus a PX 625 button cell for the light meter were used for power supply . The camera was also known as the Agfa Family Moviematic C 100 on the export market.

The camera delivered good image quality, and the image was also perfect.

projector

The projector was called Agfa Family p , it could not project onto a screen, but only onto a built-in screen, which is why Agfa spoke of a monitor. The device had horizontal coils and an extremely small screen measuring 8 cm × 10 cm. Later attempts were made to remedy the latter with a magnifying glass that enlarged the image to 15.5 cm × 20.5 cm. At the front of the projector there was a shelf for six 15 m spools with which the developed film came from the laboratory. While automatic threading had long been standard with ordinary projectors, the film had to be inserted into the Family p manually.

When the projector was switched on, its drive motor was running. Moving the rotary switch on the top of the device to the right started the film transport. The film could be inserted in the middle position of this switch and rewinding took place in the left position. On the front there was a red and an orange button and the switch for the timer. The latter stopped the film transport for a photo for about 3 seconds to 5 seconds and then continued the film transport. If the timer was deactivated, the black button was used to continue the transport. With the red button you could view a still image even if the camera had not recorded a single image, i.e. there was no marker to pause the film, or an ordinary Super 8 film was inserted.

Like the camera, the projector always ran at 18 frames / s, it could record 120 m spools and worked with an 8 V, 20 W cold mirror lamp. The low output and thus the heat radiation of this lamp allowed an unlimited length of still images without melting the film.

The screen provided a sharp and clear picture with uniform brightness, which also applied to side viewing. Still images flickered a little, however. The small size was only sufficient for two to three people to view at the same time.

Instant photo addition

As a special refinement, Agfa presented the Family p together with an instant photo attachment that could be attached to the side, which was only available at the end of 1981. This made it easy to get paper copies of your photos. This addition used instant film from competitor Kodak PR 10, its format was 6.8 cm × 9 cm.

design

Both the camera and the projector were designed by Schlagheck Schultes Design , the studio that also designed all of the other Agfa cameras. The camera had an unusually round shape.

success

Sales figures

Agfa Family turned out to be almost unsaleable. The time of the Super 8 film was over, which the additional photo function couldn't change. With the complex plastic housings for the camera and projector, the system caused immense development and production costs, which contributed significantly to the demise of the Munich camera factory .

Fritz Pölking described the situation with the words:

“Do you still remember the Agfa Super 8 camera system“ Family ”? It was a flop of gigantic dimensions conceived at the green table. According to the rumor, the person responsible at Agfa wanted to throw himself from the fourteenth floor of the administration with suicidal intentions: It did not succeed. Outside, the unsalable cardboard boxes with this plastic film camera were piled up to the twelfth floor. If there was an entry in the ' Guinness Book of Records ' for the wrong product in the wrong place at the worst time, Agfa would surely have got it. "

concept

The combination of film and photo camera could only be realized as a digital camera, with chemical film either the film format was too small for an acceptable photo quality or the film consumption for the moving images was too high for an amateur camera. Paper images could also be obtained from ordinary Super 8 films; some photo labs accepted films in which individual images were selected by marking them, for example with a string in the perforation. However, due to the limited quality, hardly any use was made of it.

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ a b c test (Stiftung Warentest), April 1981 edition
  2. ^ Günther Kadlubek: AGFA. History of a German global company from 1867 to 1997 . ISBN 3-895061-69-7
  3. ↑ Fritz Pölking: Werkstattbuch Naturfotografie (Chapter: Why is there no longer a German photo industry? ). ISBN 3-929192-17-9