SHORT: Kodak Disc Cameras

Introduced by Kodak in 1982, the disc film format mounted fifteen 8x10mm exposures radially on a disc mounted in a plastic cartridge. This greatly simplified film loading and produced a very compact form-factor comparable to modern digital point-and-shoot cameras. Yet despite strong initial sales, disc cameras quickly faded in popularity due to their incompatibility with existing photo developing and infrastructure, and were pulled from the market after only 6 years.
Chindogu video: • The Complex Contradict...
SOURCES:
www.retroist.com/p/the-rise-a...
web.archive.org/web/201501310...
web.archive.org/web/201604242...
www.democratandchronicle.com/...
clickamericana.com/media/phot...
camera-wiki.org/wiki/Disc_film

[@Spritetm]

"[When the battery died] you could mail your camera to Kodak, free of charge..." I see what you did there.

[@Elephantine999]

Huh?

[@tarstarkusz]

@@Elephantine999 The battery is "free of charge" as in it needs to be charged.

[@paulwalsh2458]

@@Elephantine999 Duh?

[@Justanotherconsumer]

I first saw this joke on a box stage left at Benaroya Hall in Seattle on a box labeled “Batteries, free of charge.”

[@Justanotherconsumer]

@@Elephantine999”charge” in this case meaning a cost to purchase the item, as well as absence of electrical power.

[@howardmaryon]

In 1982, I was the owner of a busy photolab in central London, England. We had our usual visit from our Kodak sales rep where he explained about the new film format that was going to revolutionise the amateur photography market, and was making sure we were going to get the necessary extra equipment to handle the rush. I said I would think about it. I want and bought a disc camera and film, and spent the weekend shooting with it. On the monday I got in a taxi and went to the only central London lab that could handle it. When I collected the results.... the prints were just awful, even worse lack of definition of 110 format. When the Kodak rep came next I gave him the camera and negs and prints. He never mentioned it to me again.

[@frogz]

this is how you make "shorts", under 10 minutes, the old length of the longest video you could upload to youtube, never change good sir, never change!!

[@nooneinpart]

Because every video should be 10 minutes and there are absolutely no topics whatsoever you could cover in 1 minute.

[@tarstarkusz]

I can't stand the KZbin SHORTS format. It drives me nuts. Plus, it's for dumb people. I'm already dumb enough, I don't need to get any dumber by lowering my attention span.

[@nooneinpart]

@@tarstarkusz Not afraid to say the quiet part out loud, eh?

[@frogz]

@@nooneinpart doomscrolling for dummies, infinite content in 15/60 second chunks ;)

[@nooneinpart]

@@frogz You participate in the content mill too, it seems. 🙂 I just think it’s a bit ridiculous of a metric to judge people.

[@MrTherende]

I was an engineer at Kodak Apparatus Division Research Labs (KADRL) when the disk camera was designed. The biggest issue we had was the lens system which was 'cost constrained' especially when the camera was paired with a less than stellar film base. The people at KADRL built a digital version that used floppy disks instead of the film cartridge. Unfortunately, Kodak Office shot down the idea because it would cut into film sales.

[@G6JPG]

I remember using a floppy-based camera at work; I don't think it was Kodak - SONY I think. Was good for its time.

[@howardmaryon]

Kodak could have beaten Sony to the punch with the floppy disk camera. The rest is history...

[@tookitogo]

@@G6JPGSony made digital cameras using actual 3.5” floppy disks. But both Sony and Canon (and maybe others) made _analog_ electronic cameras, called “still video cameras” that recorded onto smaller floppy disks!

[@G6JPG]

@@tookitogo The one I used used standard 3½" floppies. It also had the option to use ambient light for the viewfinder backlight, if it was sunny - the backlight diffuser came out as a strip at the top. This is the only device I've ever used (camera, 'phone, laptop, …) that did this: I thought it was an excellent idea (both to save battery, and because backlights then weren't very powerful then and pretty useless in bright sunlight). I've often wondered why it wasn't more widely used.

[@tookitogo]

@@G6JPG very interesting!! On a similar vein, my first cellphone was a Motorola CD920, which had an LCD with an absolutely magical “cat’s eye” transflective LCD - it was so good at reflecting ambient light that you could read the LCD by candlelight without straining. I’ve never before or since encountered an LCD with that good a reflector. (And it had a good backlight too.) According to Motorola, it was a holographic reflector. They called it “Optimax”.

[@dangoldbach6570]

Man I had one of these given to me by my mother’s aunt in 1993. Kept it for years until I moved from New Hampshire to Atlanta in 2003. It still worked, but I thought it was stupid so I threw it into the trash dumpster, I can still remember it smashing as I hurled it against the back wall. 15 years later I became a film camera fanatic and I regret that moment forever. It still had film in it. Shame on me for that 😢

[@samuelchan699]

I worked on a printer capable of printing disk film. This was in the 2000's, so long after disk film had been discontinued. The printer did not have the Kodak lens, but one made by the machine's manufacturer. It was obvious this was a last-minute add on accessory as it never worked well and the alignment was always a tad off. Combined with the criminally small negative size, the few pictures we printed were atrocious! One of the film processor did have the capability of processing the negatives, but I was told it had a bad habit of jamming and dumping the disks to the bottom of the tank. My father did own a disk camera, but only shot it during one summer before deciding that the Kodak 110 camera it was supposed to replace was actually better. I still have it in my collection of cameras with discontinued film formats

[@20chocsaday]

The 110 was easily small enough.

[@scottplumer3668]

@@20chocsaday yea, I had a 110 camera that was the size of a pack of long cigarettes, and could easily fit in my pocket. The disc camera, for all its convenience, couldn't fit easily. But both took equally crappy pictures.

[@20chocsaday]

@@scottplumer3668 People are willing to use several exposures to make a decent photographic record. As an example, I was at a wedding and everyone at the tables of 8 guests had a cheap 126 camera in front of them. There were many exposures taken from even more angles. I saw myself in one made up print. That's how I knew some of them had been present.

[@howardmaryon]

Please see my comment, My photolab in London decided not to gear up to handle the disk format, one of the best decisions I ever made, despite some pressure from Kodak.

[@gdutfulkbhh7537]

That's right: the disc was a dreadful idea, in terms of what it meant for the negative's size.

[@BoSmith7045]

My family had the 6000. I loved that camera. I took it on all my trips during high school. It fit in my pocket easily, the flip down cover meant I didn't have to worry about messing up the lens or accidentally hitting the button, no fiddling with the film advance. And it took great pictures. ( Blowing them up was never a concern.) I wished I could have taken it with me when I enlisted. I had to make do with some $10 generic camera I picked up in a base exchange.

[@Kevin75668]

Never had a disc camera, but seeing that film box brought back memories.

[@WhileTrueCode]

flawless production quality. script, pacing, b-roll, edits... feels like a well oiled machine

[@wernerviehhauser94]

Made the last photos on my 4000 back in 1997. And then had trouble finding any shop able to develop and print it.....

[@hoilst265]

I have a theory that these are responsible for the cheap CD players of 90s. No, wait, here me out. One of the things you needed for a decent CD laser was a tiny lens. It was noted at the time that it was revolutionary that Kodak figured out how to make tiny aspheric lenses (what these cameras needed) cheap enough, and small enough, and precise enough, and they did that via a new, novel process: instead of grinding, they moulded them directly, using a silicon carbide mould (which can be precisely made, is very tough, and molten glass won't stick to it). And from this, instead of spending hours grinding precise laser lenses needed for CD players, you could pop out hundreds, or thousands, an hour. This is why CD players went from $900 in the eighties to $50 in the 90s.

[@usaturnuranus]

Thanks! Never heard about this, but it sounds believable. I have always wondered just how difficult it was to produce a lens precise enough to read optical data formats.

[@Robert08010]

I'd be willing to bet the disc camera used plastic lenses, not glass. If you ever pointed one of these at the sun, the image looked very bad which was either due to plastic lenses or poorly ground glass lenses.

[@josephkanowitz6875]

ב''ה, definitely some kind of shared inspiration, where I'm feeling like the storage maybe came first and inspired Kodak as was known for being vaguely stodgy with consumer product development, but don't have the details. Most of the CD players I've poked at had plastic lenses? Did the Disc cameras have real glass in there? The lower-end models were 110-like but I had a lot of fun with one of the best 110s ever made as a thrift store find.

[@jnharton]

@@Robert08010Why you would expect a film camera to take good pictures when pointed at the sun? Seems like the very definition of over exposure.

[@hoilst265]

@@josephkanowitz6875 True, but this was back in the eighties - no one really took PMMA or other resins seriously for serious optical applications. They were used to cheap point-and-shoots as early as the fifties (Kodak's 127 cameras used them a lot), but for anything serious and precise - like a cameras that needs to focus down on a teeny area and still take good photos, or read a CD - they didn't really trust it for anything serious. The first somewhat serious camera lens with acrylic elements was in 1993: the Tamron 71D. It used "hybrid aspherical" lens elements, which were ordinary, ground glass spherical elements, but made aspherical by having a moulded acrylic aspherical part cemented to it. I'm sure CD lasers would've changed to acrylic later, when it got good enough. How old were the ones you've torn down?

[@fredblonder7850]

This is from memory, so I’m unsure of all the details but: In addition to recording the image on the film, the Disc Cameras recorded the exposure details digitally, on the magnetic hub of the disc. This system was also used by the (equally bizarre) APS file format. This allowed the exposure information to be used in setting the exposure for printing, guaranteeing that any reprints you had done would be identical. I think you may be wrong about the shutter on the cartridge. I was told that it would close WHENEVER the cartridge was removed from the camera, so you could swap cartridges mid-roll to (for example) change film-speeds, without losing any exposures. The extremely short focal-length of the camera lens meant that that focal-plane inside the camera was extremely flat, so normal roll-film (even with a pressure plate) would not lay flat enough to produce a good image with such a short focal-length lens. In other words, it was ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that the film be super-rigid, which meant it could not be rolled, which was why the exposures were arranged in a ring, all in the same plane. So the entire purpose of this odd format was to deal with the weird lens. When I first saw this format, my first thought was that it looks a lot like Viewmaster Reels, and I was disappointed that there wasn’t a stereo version of the Disc Camera.

[@tookitogo]

While I’ve seen _claims_ of this magnetic strip in modern discussions, I can’t find any contemporaneous mention of it, including in technical drawings of it. I suspect this stems from confusion with the bar codes on the film disc and cartridge, which better photo labs would print onto the back of a print to make it easier to identify which cartridge held its negative.

[@fredblonder7850]

@@tookitogo If this is an urban legend, it dates back to the origin of the cameras. I was told this by someone who’d just bought one and was showing it off, when they were brand-new. Perhaps it was planned and never worked.

[@ianbakke]

You can’t actually change disc mid way without loosing a picture. The camera starts advancing the film to the next game as soon as you put a disc in. I used one last year and was a bit confused by this, but apparently it is correct, the camera is supposed to skip that frame, so no disc swapping.

[@JonHancockUK]

I had the Minolta Disc-7, which I took with me on my first trip to America. Picture quality aside (and obviously that's a pretty big issue to gloss over) it was a terrific snapshot camera. The "selfie stick" connected to a pivoting grip on the side of the camera body, which worked extremely well as a handle for steadying every shot. As for the extendable stick itself, I mostly used it to take pictures when in crowds, where the ability to raise it up and see what I was shooting in the mirror allowed me to take some good snaps of things I simply couldn't see properly at ground level. Quick, convenient and compact, in many ways it gave a taste of the digital camera experience before we had digital cameras.

[@TheBigdog868]

I still remember the jingle 🎶 "I'm gonna getcha with the Kodak Disc!" These cameras were heavily advertised, as all products that don't work well need to be. The photos it took were less than stunning. The negatives were just too small, and as you covered, film processors didn't usually care to massage more quality out of this strange format. Great video!

[@NickWeissMusic]

My grandma LOVED hers, she grew up in the depression, had an 8th grade education, but could paint, play the piano and was the Ansel Addams of disc photography lol. I never once thought of this as significant before you brought back these memories, but I make my living playing music and shooting photos. Huh. Go figure. Wish she could have imparted some painting talent though, she motored through Bob Ross and Bill Alexander episodes when I was a kid, I just didn’t get it, still don’t :) . Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

[@heatonize]

any way for the public to see her photos?

[@jeffdroog]

Well,education doesn't stop at school.Im sure she learned her entire life,and was fulfilled by such knowledge...No one should be judged by their government mandated education,but rather how they continued to grow as human going forward.

[@NickWeissMusic]

@@heatonize know what, I don’t even have any of them, and I’m not sure anything would have been bigger than 5x7 due to the neg size, but I’m sure the landscapes she shot of her favorite vacations spot Sanibel Island FL and around Kauai the one time she went there would be amazing time capsules, those places have changed a lot in 3-4 decades. I’ll have to ask my mom and uncle where all the albums are. Obviously I was overstating her abilities, she wasn’t printing herself, but good composition is good composition, she just got it.

[@NickWeissMusic]

@@jeffdroog her husband, my grandpa, never made more than $20 an hour, his entire life, and left all three of his kids over $40,000 when he died at 89, after paying for his own retirement home. My grandma lived off clerical jobs so she could put every single paycheck of his in savings during World War II. Those folks were built different. I can’t even pay… attention.

[@heatonize]

@@NickWeissMusic some people just have a good natural eye, i get it. Hopefully you find them even just for your own curiosity

[@Ice_Karma]

I had one of these when I was a kid, in the mid-1980s. Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana visited my home town and planted a commemorative tree, not far from where we lived, so my parents dragged me to see them. On the walk home, I found a Disc 4000 camera in the road, and because there were no identifying markings on it, and nobody else around, they let me keep it. I used it quite a bit over the next few years, but I don't remember what became of it: whether I lost it, it broke, or it was replaced by a cheap 35 mm point-and-shoot I remember having in the late '80s and early '90s.

[@stephanelsner9391]

As a child I received a Disc 4000 camera as a Christmas present. I remember being totally disappointed with the pictures it produced, which were much worse than those of my Agfa Pocket 110 camera. I think I shot two or three films with the camera, then it ended up in the junk box.

[@douglasjohnson4382]

Exactly.

[@_ky5824]

The image quality of 110 film is already bad enough; I cannot imagine how bad it was like on such a tiny format.

[@howardmaryon]

See my comment :)

[@matthewalker]

I was expecting this video to be about floppy disc cameras. I'd never heard of these. My first camera as a kid in the 80s was a 110. Must have been the simplest and cheapest at the time

[@andrewtinker7537]

These came into popularity about the time I was finding 35mm to be a bit too small and was making the transition to medium format and then eventually 4x5. As a result, I remember getting one as a gift and literally never using it. I found it in a box many years later, and only then realized that I could no longer get film, so into the bin it went.

[@douglasjohnson4382]

Forward looking and smart decision.

[@Robert08010]

Where it belonged!!

[@marcberm]

A familiar sounding story that reminds me of APS film. Though that was an industry collaboration, it suffered the same fate (failed mass adoption, less than ideal frame size, etc.). I still have dozens of APS cassettes that can now only be reprinted by destroying the cartridge and cutting up the negative.

[@timchorle]

I remember constantly running into these at yard sales, second hand stores, etc in the 90s. It always occurred to me that there must be some reason why I saw so many of them disposed of, now I finally know why.

[@Andronicus2007]

110 format cameras were also very small, and very cheap. I had a Hanimex 110 camera that I bought very cheap in 1983 and used for about a decade. It gave pretty good results, obviously not as good as 35mm, but good enough for casual photos. I still remember the satisfying feeling of the advance frame switch underneath and the silly disposable multi flash things that you put in the top of the camera if you needed a flash.

[@Robert08010]

Between March and December of 1985, I worked for a photo processing plant that was tied to a N-E supermarket chain. In that short time that I worked there, they added a new machine just for auto-printing Disc pictures; their first. They would load some number of processed discs into a vaguely cylindrical tube with a handle. However if you weren't very careful, all the discs could fall out all over the floor, which I saw happen first hand. The flaw in the process was that the sequence was everything. Once they were randomized, reuniting them with the proper order was nearly impossible. I'm glad the format flopped. But it was bound to because of its tiny negative resulting is over sized grain and low quality. The smaller the negative, the larger and lens imperfections appear. The greater number of people who adopted it, the less people who wanted it. You quickly learned to only use it where you didn't want to take your good camera.

[@deltacx1059]

Well I'm glad this "short" is not in that hideous vertical format.

[@theskig]

My childhood friend had a Kodak Disc camera in the late 80's. We went many times on holiday and he always had his Kodak Disc with him. I thought it was really cool, expecially the developed films with the "flower" of pictures. My tool at the time was a yellow water-resistent Minolta with 110 film.

[@douglasjohnson4382]

You had the better camera. And it looked cooler too.

[@theskig]

@@douglasjohnson4382 eheh thanks :)

[@kc4cvh]

In the last decades of photography there was a persistent trend toward smaller negatives in consumer-grade cameras, with image sizes shrinking from 56 x 42mm to 8 x 10mm in the disc camera. The resolution of the image did not necessarily decrease as much as the size of the negative, since the film and optics did improve, but a negative the same size as an 8mm movie frame was bound to be give blurry or grainy prints.

[@nunyabidniz2868]

Maybe I missed it, but I believe you failed to mention what really made these disc cameras unique: Kodak was able to sell the 1st mass market optical instrument featuring an aspheric lens element by injection molding said lens. It was truly a bind-moggling development [if you'll pardon the pun] which brought these snapshot cameras considerable mention in all the photography magazines at the time, when they otherwise would have been ignored or laughed at derisively.

[@JumpingSpiderDesign]

Such nostalgia! The 4000 and a Kodak 110 were the discarded 'toy' cameras we played with at my grandparents' circa 1986. They certainly were suckers for a new format - went whole hog on Advantix! Great video as always:)

[@ChrisAthanas]

Not making the special equipment very low cost and not having an automated way of processing the film was the death knell for the format and devices End to end customer experience is everything

[@briangray5921]

I had one. picture quality was crap even for back then. Still have fond memories of it.

[@billharris6886]

Hello Gilles, thanks for another outstanding video. I greatly enjoy the superb research you put into each one. I remember the Kodak Disc camera well; yet another offering to the average non-photography savvy person wishing to take a snapshot. Kodak had moved from a simple roll film camera in the 1960's to cassette film loading to greatly simplify film loading, starting with their 126 series films. Continuing with that theme to make the camera smaller and lighter; 110 film, then the Disk format. I was shooting 35mm Kodachrome 64 at the time so, assumed the Disk format would have significant grain problems, which it did. However, since about 1980, the film labs turned out progressively worse and worse quality prints, there was not that much difference in the print quality between a 35mm fine grain film and the Disk. This is why I always shot slide film, to prevent the photo lab from ruining my photos. Today the smart phones have incredibly good cameras incorporated which are fully automatic any idiot can use to obtain reasonably good photos. Since the display shows you what the picture will look like before snapping the picture, there are far fewer pictures taken via a simple viewfinder and far fewer pictures with peoples heads cut off. 😊

[@ErraticPT]

Both myself and my sister had these disc cameras, iirc I had a 6000 and my sister a 4000 (both received as gifts). While they worked fine, there was a big problem, many developer either wouldn't/couldn't process them or charged extra to do so. The cost of the film disc film too was expensive (compared to standard film), which led to both of us (as kids) having to persuade our parents to fork out for both the film and processing. Finally another nail in the disc formats coffin was often the pictures ended up somewhat blurry, whether this was down to the small size of the film or subpar lenses I don't know.

[@ms_enj]

The camera used by Mona Lisa Vito's character (played by Marisa Tomei) in My Cousin Vinny.

[@AtheistOrphan]

That’s right, a ‘Le Clic’ model aimed at young people.

[@soundguydon]

My Mom had one of these when I was a kid in the 80's.. I thought it was the neatest thing :-) Great video as always!

[@markawbolton]

I was part of setting up the machinery to process and print discs. The Laboratory quality of the RD film was extrordinary. The format was slightly samlller than 110 ... but the results were very good. The production film however was rubbish. I am so glad to see the end of silver halide... in general but disk in particular... it wasnt a sucess.

[@WookieeMonster1]

I remember these! My mom had one (don't remember the model). She was pretty much the official picture taker for the family, so it was a much easier thing for her to tote around and use. I recall the pictures being of at least acceptable quality, as we never had anything blown up.

[@terryfaulkner5062]

I worked on the Kodak Disc Camera program from its inception. Several posters have mentioned that the small negative size created image quality problems and they are correct. More specifically, the image was degraded by excessive graininess. Buy why did this happen? At the very beginning of the program the image quality goal was set to being equivalent to prints from 400 speed Kodacolor in the 110 format. After all, it seemed that was good enough because Kodak sold a substantial amount of that film, It was not until after the Disc Camera was launched that I discovered that more than half of all the Kodacolor 400 110 cartridges being sold were those that were included with every 110 camera kit that Kodak sold. That is, people purchasing a 110 camera tried the roll of film that came with it then switched to the 100 speed Kodacolor 110 cartridges, While the lower price may have contributed to their rejection of the 400 speed product; the image quality of the 400 speed product was also a factor. For many users, I believe that it was not "good enough".

[@kurtiunlisted8589]

Thought this a couple of times already watching your videos: I love the topics you’re selecting! ❤️

[@CAMacKenzie]

I had a Disc Camera. I bought it at a gift shop at Grand Teton National Park. I had started my vacation with an Exacta, a great heavy chunk of 35mm SLR that clacked loudly, but which, without any automatic features, or even a light meter, took beautiful pictures. I was getting out of the boat that went across Jenny Lake when I dropped in the water. I wanted something to go on taking pictures and, there in the gift shop, they had Discs, and I got one, a 6000. After I got home I got another proper 35mm camera, but i still used the Disc for hiking and such when I didn't want to carry the good camera, though, sometimes I'd take both. About the film, you couldn't just take the film disk to your local film developer, you had to put it in a special cardboard box that came with the film disc and send it to Kodak for development. The box came as a flat thing which you sort of bulged out and folded up the ends, and the disc in the box went into an envelope that also came with ehe film. For the first year or so the pictures, though not anywhere as good as the Exacta's, or its replacement, weren't bad, but after that the quality went downhill, particularly the color, to the point that I stopped using it. Another thing I remember about it was that it was not good for taking pictures of moving things, as, when you pushed the button, the camera would advance the film before tripping the shutter, the reverse of what I had expected, so I got pictures of the tails of animals which had run or flown away when they heard the whirr of the advance.

[@joshuaobelenusable]

I remember shooting with a 4000 in the 90s for a short bit until the battery died. Never understood the disgust from the photo guy when I would drop off the discs until now... Must have been "fun" to develop compared to the quicker to process roll film.

[@AtheistOrphan]

I was that guy! The films were a nightmare to process. (Shudders at the memories).

[@Robert08010]

@@AtheistOrphan I had to print them but I never handeled developing them.

[@ultandeburca8057]

I sold disc cameras and processed the film. They were a great innovation at the time. The ease of use and the integrated flash and motor were the selling points. At first the film was of a high quality but later Kodak made changes to the chemistry of the film and the quality fell off a cliff. Films manufactured by most other manufacturers were generally woeful (except fuji), as were disc cameras made by other companies, which often stripped the cameras of the features that were it's raison d'etre. The last nail in the coffin was the trend towards larger prints. 6"x4" became the norm and disc film started to look like a case of acne at this size. Their importance lay in their design, use of reliable miniature motors, use of lithium batteries and integrated flash, making the future marketing of digital products, years later, much simpler.

[@davidg4288]

It sounds like Kodak had a plan, that being the best optics (for the price) and really good film. The film could be expensive since you only needed a tiny piece. Kind of like cassette tape, there was so little tape in there that it could be really good tape and eventually rival reel to reel. It seems like Kodak at some point decided that no one would know the difference and cheap out on an 8mm piece of film. People noticed.

[@marstondavis]

My story about my Disc camera is that I was going on a trip. I had a girl over and she stole my Kodak Disc, and I didn't know it until I was at my destination. I was PISSED! The next day I was sitting in a park and looked under the bench I was sitting on. There was a camera bag. It had dew on it from being there all night. I opened the bag and there was a very nice Minolta with three lenses. I bought some film and had some beautiful pictures of my vacation. This was back in 1983 and I have neither those snapshots nor the Minolta. So, it's like I bought a cheap Disc and ended up with a nice Minolta. The best part is I never saw that thieving girl again.

[@Robert08010]

Karma must be a photographer!!!

[@iggytse]

I almost forgot about this. I was a kid in the 80s. I have vague recollections of this camera, probably from tv commercials. Never seen one in real life.

[@jartrain]

Very cool, informative short! Keep doing more camera videos, they are fantastic!

[@spajdude]

I've been scanning some of my 9x12 cm negatives today (3.55x4.72 Inch), and they are almost 100 times larger than disc film negatives. 😄 My grandmother bought a Kodak Disc camera but was disappointed by how grainy and unsharp the photos were.

[@glhx2112]

I loved my Disc Camera back in the day. It was more about convenience than quality. I had a few decent 35mm SLR's, but, during road trips while stationed in Europe and when I needed to pack lite I grabbed my trusty Disc camera (I think it was a model 4000) and off I went. I took thousands of pictures back then.

[@cabbelos]

One thing that also sped up the demise was that a year later, in 1983, Fuji introduced the DL-20 and DL-100 with drop-in film loading on a normal 35mm cartridge negating the main advantage Disc film ever had. I have the DL-20 and it still works fine. Pop the back open, throw the film cartridge in there and close it. The camera has a small cutting blade inside to ensure the film leader is the right length.

[@AirbornChaos]

I had a model 3000 (I believe) as a kid in the '80s. I know it took a 9-volt, but I remember it looking different. I absolutely loved it, but I was 12 so it was really just a gateway-camera. Today, I can see how bad the photos were, but I didn't care back then. I wish I'd known then, why every film processor in town ruined every third disk of film. Now I feel bad for them.

[@Robert08010]

Ha!! My first full time job was working at a photo processing plant for a large N.E. supermarket chain. The day I was being trained on how to use the disc printer machine, I watched the manager remove a sleeve or tube of 50 to 100 discs and dump them all over the floor. Glad it was him and not me. But the idea is, if that happened BEFORE printing, there is virtually no hope of reconnecting them with the proper order. The negatives were already processed to that was no problem, but the only record of the orders hinged on what order the negatives went into the sleeve. Thankfully in this case, the negatives had already been printed so then it was just a pain in the but getting the negatives sorted and matched back up to the prints. But imagine what if they were dropped on their way to the printer?!??! I have no doubt we dropped other batches.

[@BenjaminMaggi]

I've been following the channel for the past 20 or so month and every new video is so exiting to watch, swesome host, I'm afraid this channel is going to grow so big that I'll feel old very soon, congrats and great success !

[@kmoecub]

My mother had one when they were the new hotness. I never did understand the appeal of the format. A traditional 16mm still camera was smaller overall (especially the Minox-types), and produced better negatives. Even her myriad of cheap 110 cameras were superior (though a tad heavier and much larger.) Kodak; A film company that also sells cameras.

[@sparkybluefox]

I have a MINT Kodak tele Challenger disk camera..... It's in perfect condition. Thank you for posting this awesome video on the Kodak Disk cameras !! Please keep up the great videos ! SBF

[@owensmith7530]

My mum had one of these. She quickly gave up on it as it took awful pictures. She moved on to a 35mm point and shoot camera which took much better pictures as you'd expect.

[@mbox314]

My dad was talking about cameras him and my mom bought which were junk and he mentioned disk cameras. Considering the non removeable battery on the 4000 I can understand his feelings.

[@SeanBZA]

Well that battery will easily last 10 years, and with the capacity of those lithium thionyl primary cells to make them flat you would have had to run 1000 disk films through, all with flash on, before they got to the point they would no longer be able to fire the flash, but still would have enough energy to run the disk motor for another 500 disks. They also only were guaranteed for 5 years, but they typically will still be good after 15 years, and, as Kodak was a manufacturer of them, integrated the battery line into the product, as it is made using a film process, which they are masters of. I have used some that, after 25 years, are still producing near full output voltage, but are no longer capable of supplying any current, which is still fine as a memory back up use, or as a power source for a 3V LCD clock.

[@davidg4288]

@@SeanBZA There's some hazard with lithium thionyl primary cells, Kodak probably didn't want consumers handling them and opening them up or shorting them out or whatever. We used to buy those for CMOS backup in computers and the manufacturer made us sign a big disclaimer about not opening them and returning them for disposal which *they* then failed to accept.

[@11THEFEZMAN11]

I worked in a mini lab in the late 80’s disc film was a pain in the ass to deal with

[@BuckeyeStormsProductions]

I remember my older brother getting one of these for Christmas circa mid 80's. Later I got a 110. He convinced me to swap him cameras on tbe basis of how much cooler the disc camera was. To be fair, it did have a more, *futuristic," vibe to it.

[@KageShi]

One of my first cameras was a Manual Disc camera. Of all the cameras I've had I miss my ALPS cameras and hardware the most.

[@scottplumer3668]

As is so often the case, convenience trumps quality, but I think the rise of the 35mm point and shoot cameras also helped kill disc and 110.

[@subethasoftware]

Oh, man. I loved my Disc camera. It was super convenient. That’s the camera I took on our first trip to EPCOT the first summer it was open. Now I wonder if I still have it somewhere…

[@ocularpatdown]

I had one of these when I was a kid. Loved it!

[@56Seeker]

I had one, can't remember the model number (UK), but it was the brushed metal finish with lens cover model. Loved it.

[@osgeld]

one of my grandmothers had one in the 80's when I was real little ... it eventually went away and like most of us she got a point n shoot 35mm eventually. My mom had a 110 she gave me when I was like 7 or 8 cause she was so disappointed with it... though she has a really nice cannon she bought in college

[@plunder1956]

I do remember these being heavily promoted at our local Boots the Chemist in England. Even by then the idea of these tiny negatives put me off. However I did later own a Yashica Samurai half frame camera (Left hand version, because I am left eyed) and used it one handed on the move while cycling. I later sold it on to a wheelchair user who needed a left handed model. It actually produced fairly good pictures.

[@AvGas]

I saved up from my paper route and bought the 4000. I think it was 60 bucks? Good camera for the time.

[@Madness832]

We had a disc camera (it was some other brand, but I forgot which). In the summer of '87, I took it on our trip to Cape Cod.

[@76horsepower]

I had a particularly small disc camera for a while in the mid-80s. I don’t recall the brand, but it was completely mechanical with no batteries and didn’t include a flash, instead having a hotshoe for an external one. It was square rather than rectangular, and was hardly bigger than the disc film itself. It was convenient, but as mentioned, the photo quality was pretty poor, and I quickly moved on to a 35mm camera. Looking back though, it was a neat piece, and I wish I knew what happened to it.

[@chrissmith7669]

These things were great for sneaking photos back in the day.

[@Ranger_Kevin]

They missed a chance there to offer slide-film and make the disk compatible with the viewmaster system.

[@Evil0tto]

As a teen I had the 4000. I really liked its ease of use.

[@465maltbie]

I bought one of these in 1987, it was a good simple camera and easy to travel with. Charles

[@centralillinoisrailpix453]

I worked in photography labs in the 1980s-2000s, and we always discouraged those cameras on the sales side of the outfit. We did not process the film, because at the time we did not have computer preview of films, so you were dependent on the printer,(me) eyeing the negative and setting color balance and exposure. This was nearly impossible with film that size. If our customers wanted a compact camera that small, I guided people toward the Olympus XA-series, just a tad bigger and offering a 35mm negative. My father-in-law had three of those cameras. When disc cameras started failing, especially due to drive gear failure, Kodak would either send you a VR35 camera or 30.00 for your trouble. ( The drive gear failed so often they made it out of pink plastic so it could be readily found and replaced, "pinky gear,"btw) In the end, even Kodak admitted failure.

[@KristovMars]

Two thoughts came to mind as I watched. 1) I wonder if the "disc" format was conceived with the notion that consumers were primed by Compact Disc to be receptive and excited because Disc=future! 2) Although there were other manufacturers producing film in this format, the "locked-down" nature of the device (weird film, special processing required, unreplaceable batteries oh my!) feels a bit like the business model favoured by printer manufacturers today (buy our ink or we'll brick your device), as well as the pox that is planned obsolescence. I have fond memories of my first camera which used 110 film, but the handful of prints I still have provide good arguments for my upgrade to 35mm :D Anyway, another interesting video so thank you.

[@cujoedaman]

I love how the slot to load the film looks and acts like a CD player, but the disc itself looks and acts like a standard 1.44MB floppy disk :D

[@dalehammond1749]

Thanks, your video answers several questions for me. I found a "Perry" disc camera with exposed film inside. Developing old exposed film is my hobby. But I've never done a disc. I'll darkroom load it with HC-110 and see what happens.

[@Allan_aka_RocKITEman]

Great video, Gilles...👍

[@GLASSB182]

So that is how this strange Kodak disc camera works. Lol I actually assumed it took actual miniature digital discs! Mine is a 6000 model

[@passopicablo4591]

I like how his bow tie matches the Kodak colour. Nice!

[@jeffclark2725]

I remember those cameras thumbs up great video

[@michaelturner4457]

I'm sure what also killed intested in Disc format, was that by mid-80s low-cost point-n-shoot 135 cameras became popular. Also with Disc, it's only 15 shots, compared to 135's upto 36 shots. Even the cartridge formats, 110 and 126, could take up to 20 or 24 shots, as well as better quality with a larger image size. I think part of Kodak's marketing was to focus on "disc" aspect of it, as like Compact Disc was introduced around the same time. It was something completely new, instead of roll films, cassette tapes, LP records, etc.

[@organfairy]

And the disc was flat so the camera could fit in a pocket - as far as I remember the commercials always focused on a photographer pulling the camera out of a small pocket, where 135 cameras always had to be in a separate bag.

[@RobCamp-rmc_0]

Speaking of 110 format, will you ever cover it? I was an amateur photographer of sorts, even with darkroom experience, but my work was primarily with 35mm-and just a bit of large format film. I, and I assume many others, associate 110 format with cheap trinket cameras (my first cameras were 110s, a cheap Kodak Mickey Mouse camera, followed by a “spy” camera that was scarcely larger than the 110 cartridge it held), but I know that there were high end 110 cameras, even SLRs with interchangeable lenses. I’m digging the photography oddball videos and I’d love to see a survey series on 110 format.

[@Nantawat_Kittiwarakul]

My late father who ran a small film developing business back in the day. Initially he's interested in the idea but once he saw the actual camera and the film size, he immediately said "The image quality is gonna be so crap beyond recognition. I'll never join this bandwagon." Seems to be the right decision. As I recall since that day till when he ultimately closed down the shop around early 2010's, NOT EVEN A SINGLE CUSTOMER ever show up with this camera format, or even ever ask for it. It's literally dead on arrival in my country.

[@filmclipuk]

I worked in a camera shop in my 'teens, and the point I was waiting for you to make was that of negative flatness compared to the 110 roll. This was all over (at least the British) photography press at the time, and was banged on about by the Kodak rep' when he brought the first sample. The 110 cartridge had no pressure plate, and as such, even expensive cameras such as the Pentax 110 SLR with its interchangeable lenses could not produce a good image due to the film plane not being kept perfectly flat. The Disc was supposed to overcome this limitation, but it just didn't catch on.

[@scottplumer3668]

Interesting! Were the images on the disc negatives the same size as 110? And were they developed with C41 developer? Reason I ask is, I develop my own film, and I have a friend who has several disks that need developed and asked me if I could.

[@petercolquhoun2086]

One of the "advancements" of the disc negatives was a very thick substrate that was supposed to help with the pressure plate issue. This thick substrate could not be bent hence the disc instead of rolls of film. We got a 4000 for my mother but the flash pictures were terrible even in 3x5 size.

[@InsaneAudioMediaJunk]

I have shot 110 negatives with remarkable sharpness, I have an 8x10 print from a Rollei 110 Camera that looks fantastic, so I'd be surprised if the Disc format was an actual improvement over that with the minuscule negative. I have printed nicely sharp 8x11mm minox negatives to postcard size, but they can't hold a candle to one of the few good 110 cameras.

[@Robert08010]

It may not have suffered from that but it suffered from other major quality issues. It's no mystery why it did its best in it's first year. That's because as more people bought it, the word got around about the lower quality even v.s. crappy 110. In my household, it quickly became the junk camera you only took to places that you didn't want to expose the good camera too like the dusty race track or a camping trip.

[@dennisk5818]

Just a couple things. I was product manager for the photo enlarger company, Beseler, in the 1990's. We had a negative carrier designed for the Disc, as well as the 110 format. Also, Kodak must have had a lot of waste in the manufacturing and coating of emulsion used for the discs. Typically, rolls of clear base material is run over the coating dies, allowing six to eight layers of emulsion (for color film) to be done at one time. Afterwards, Kodak must have had to die cut the film discs from the rolls, expose the barcode and film information to the discs, then secure them to the center plastic hub (all done in darkrooms). This would have resulted in a lot of scrap and unusable emulsion.

[@canadaisdecent1635]

Would you ever consider doing a video on the evolution of the Canadian army uniform? Keep up the great work 👍

[@artyzinn7725]

i tried all those consumer formats but was always floored by the cost of prints. the japanese were big into making 35mm more 'instant' and user friendly, such as point and shooters by olympus, minolta and konica. their cameras were small, almost cartridge like, had reuseable flash tubes and had buy anywhere batteries, and 35mm being so generic, was lower cost to obtain film from many brands, print, enlarged, processed by labs the world over, and far better resolution than instamatic and its relatives.

[@johnhicks692]

I used one at the Nashville Worlds Fair that was loaned to you at the gate and you bought the film.

[@johnhicks692]

Correction, that was the Knoxville Worlds Fair

[@mplsmark222]

These look like they were kind of a stepping stone to digital cameras. Similar form factor, even if the quality of the prints was not great. My sister had one of these and took a photo of her daughter with my very ill grandfather. She had an enlargement made and it looked awful as far as photo quality, “muddy”, out of focus. She was pretty proud of it regardless. Even a bad quality photo is better than no photo.

[@JohnAudioTech]

I had the 4000 model. Prints would look okay when there was plenty of light and the processor used the right lens, but if you wanted larger prints, there was no latitude for enlarging because the negative was already at the limit at its tiny size.

[@triggerfingerstudios]

Oh yeah, my siblings and I got these for Christmas. Easy to use. The last time I used it in the early 90s, I took the film to Walmart to be developed… and it was all a disaster. All the exposures were super grainy and pink/purple.

[@MeriaDuck]

Clock *with* alarm, that's ahead of it's time! Today it's very common to wake up by the sound your camera makes. We may call it a 'phone', but that feature is arguably the least used function of the thing! ;)

[@dereketnyre7156]

My family had a disc camera - one of the models with the silver front. Looking back at the printed photos, they were a smaller size than traditional cameras and the images were more grainy. The worst part is that the colors are now fading more than our 35mm photos………

[@pauljs75]

I had one of those as my first point and shoot, and they weren't too terribly expensive back in the day. Dunno if any companies out there still would be able to use the odd negatives on a disk to make prints though.

[@geoffreypiltz271]

The 110 and disc formats both were developments inspired by enthusiast cameras made by other companies. The 110 format is the same size as 16mm still cameras made by Minolta, Ricoh and others while the disc format is the same size as that of Minox "spy" cameras. Both of these formats appeared before Kodak applied them to the consumer market.

[@G6JPG]

What speed film? Everyone's saying the tiny film size meant automatically bad pictures, but your description of the special printing lens that few processing houses were willing to buy, suggests it was capable of better results, _if_ proper lenses were used (I'm sure the _camera_ ones weren't great, though). But for a few years in the early 70s, I used 10 ASA film (!) in my standard 8 movie camera (that could take single shots too), and that was only 3.3 × 4.5mm image size! [I've recently been scanning some of those (with a WinAit, same as a Wolverine), and the _resolution_ is pretty fair - unfortunately the 50 years haven't been kind to the film, and the _colours_ have suffered.]

[@craigd1275]

I remember these. I didn't know why they came out with this camera. Their 110 camera was about the same size. I remember people breaking the disk by sitting on them in their back pocket. I had a 35mm SLR Minolta, so I never purchased these fad cameras. .

[@Lethgar_Smith]

This camera was always a mystery to me. It was supposed to replace the 110 pocket instamatic but what was the consumer demand? There was none. The public had no reason to switch to this new format. It was not, in anyway more convenient, than the 110 and the picture quality was a huge step down. I guess the point was to streamline the development process to make it cheaper for kodak but the camera came out just as consumers were switching from cartridge film to standard 35mm for personal photography. It was a bad idea at the worst possible time.

[@Robert08010]

But most people didn't know about the step down in quality. You just assume if someone says we can take pictures on a teenie 8x10mm frame, you assume they mean at an acceptable quality. Bad assumption...

[@rockets4kids]

Disco never died, it merely went back underground as House music for 20 years before re-appearing again.

[@HennerZeller]

A girl I had a crush on in highschool had one of these. The picture quality, even with small prints, was abysmal and super grainy. My hobby was photography, I took pictures with an SLR, and developed 35mm film in the basement. I couldn't understand how she could accept, or was ignorant of, such terrible picture quality. I reconsidered my romantic interest choices.

[@goldeneaglejk2678]

When I was a kid I had the 4000 and I thought it was the greatest thing at the time. I would carry it around with me all the time because of the small size. The images were not too bad at 3x5. Who would have guessed everyone would one day be carrying a small ‘camera’ with them all the time.😂

[@allys537]

Fun fact, all these cameras were basically the same, as in the same field of view, and they all only have 2 shutter speeds, 1/100 amd 1/200 of a second. The whole system relying almost completely on the exposure latitude of the ISO 200 film. They made a new stock, their VR film, it was supposed to have several stops of exposure latitude to compensate for over/under exposure, in reality of you didn't have a TON of light indoors from the flash lr broad daylight from outdoors they were basically useless. And we all know what tiny negatives and film gain does in an underexposure setting. The whole system was designed for kids and moms in an era of "only dad gets the *good* camera" i.e. the 35mm one.