SHORT: Polaroid 440 Photoelectric Shutter

[@joycekrenz]

Well, I am really happy that the suitcase I gave to you held such interesting devices that made photography what it was in the 1950's to 1960's. It was unbearable for me to simply throw away that suitcase into the dumpster after advertising the remains of Maxwell Studios out of Portage la Prairie, MB for close to a year. Your research is first rate, and I know that these "gems" will not go to waste! Keep up the fine work Gilles!! -- Victor

[@Zbigniew_Nowak]

But the shutter speed must be related not only to the amount of light, but also to the speed of movement, usually of the person you are taking a photo of. But when it comes to taking photos of animals, the problem is even greater. So I guess it was possible to adjust the shutter speed regardless of the light issue?

[@lewispemberton5734]

Gilles, that was abso- blooming-lutely brilliant. The sheer complexity of that thing is simply fascinating! Thanks for your masterly exposition.

[@wykpenguin]

photoelectric pneumatic is certainly very rare. But many the autoexposure on many early cameras were actually photoelectric machanical where the position of the meter needle was used as a stop for setting the aperture size when the shutter was pressed.

[@joehopfield]

Absolutely wild! I would never have imagined 1) pneumatic bellows at all 2) using tiny current-galvanometer-valve to adjust... KInd of sad we vlsi microprocessors came so quickly - imagine the brilliant hacks engineers would have created!

[@Mountain-Man-3000]

I'm glad I can just watch your channel for this stuff. If I bought all these cameras and spent hours researching their history my wife would thump me.

[@X-Chë-X]

Gilles! Gilles! He's our guy! He's got weird stuff that we like!

[@Chilly_Billy]

This is really one of the most interesting and entertaining channels on KZbin. 👍

[@Daniel-jk7pe]

It really is.

[@thenoblerot]

what an absolutely goofy, ingenious mechanism!

[@RyuAzuku]

Your videos are so much better than the channel(s?) you write for. No BS, right to the point, informative, and still entertaining and fun to watch!

[@marksmith9295]

Couldnt agree more. The subjects are interesting enough but watching a "presenter" speed reading through each script borders on nauseating. I mute the sound and read the closed captions.

[@EdFrench_uk]

It's so easy to achieve this kind of functionality now: this was the golden era of ingenuity!

[@fmphotooffice5513]

Fascinating! It's a miracle that sensitive (gimbal?) and the bellows still work well enough to demonstrate how it works. Shame most large collectors refuse Polaroid cameras. They're like old Timex watches, beefy and kind of brutal in construction. Aside from some private project companies, original working Polaroid packs are very rare.

[@thrillscience]

When I was a kid I got a Polaroid camara that took the packs of color film. Around 1972 or so. (I was 10). The camera wasn't very expensive, but I remember being impressed that is had a photoelectric shutter -- quite a step up from the completely dumb "Brownie" and instamatic style cameras I had before. I suspect it was a similar concept -- designed so it could be even cheaper. The Poloroid "swinger" also had a simple light meter. I can still hear the jingle "Tilt it up, it says 'yes'" --meaning the light meter says it had enough light.

[@jmi5969]

Didn't they have affordable auto exposure cameras then? I was born in 67, on the other side of the globe, had my first camera (manual 35 mm) by the age of 8 or 9, that is 1975-1977. This cheapo camera had not one but three sibling models with auto exposure, each with a different "program". They weren't that expensive, around 10-15 equivalent US dollars (twice as much as base manual model).

[@paulbush7095]

It's like a mechanical/photocell watch complication if there even is such a thing-incredible. There is no way that I would have a clue how this thing works if Gilles did not explain it. I'm still not sure I do but I am not nearly as smart as Gilles. He really does have an engineering mindset, along with a ton of other intellectual characteristics. Great video.

[@warrenjones744]

I remember in the early 70's dad brought home a Mod 95 Land camera home from work to record valuable property for an insurance policy he had. I was fascinated by the way it unfolded and how the film was developed. At the time I thought that was the coolest thing ever, I was like 5 or 6. I didn't have a that cool shutter. Dad also had a really cool AGFA 35mm camera that fairly small and compact. The good old days of photography. : )

[@OscarFerro]

Wow, that's really clever! That galvanometer is so delicate, and yet it manages to control such a heavy mechanism.

[@jonathanreedpike]

Another great exposition of ingenuity. Such very clever engineers, perhaps in a way this led to thinking that this strength alone would allow the company to compete in the long run. Polavision, as you have noted, was an engineering marvel; apart from a brief wow! introduction the public didn't care about how amazing it was, they only cared about results.

[@marksmith9295]

Fascinating and well presented. My first SLR camera in 1972, a Zenit E made in Russia used an integral selenium cell light meter. Still had to set the aperture and shutter speed manually but was cheap and great to learn on.

[@thomashenden71]

Some analog mechanisms are vastly more impressive than even the equivalent digital mechanism, whatever that would have been, in this case. The amount of components, the delicate balancing and physical construction of some mechanisms, and that they were made without the tools we have to day, is beyond fascinating! 😮

[@JonneBackhaus]

That mechanism was ingenious

[@oldtvnut]

Wow - a pneumatic amplifier of a galvanometer reading to give variable shutter speed - just wow. The only photocell powered exposure mechanisms I have seen before involved the galvanometer simply varying the aperture for a fixed shutter speed. Here they they used that variable aperture to control a much more powerful secondary mechanism.

[@clazy8]

The guys who designed that must have had a blast

[@RCAvhstape]

The engineers at Polaroid were really clever people, it's a shame the company didn't become a giant like Kodak. I feel like the mid 20th Century just had so many big brains, with jets, space travel, computers, Bell Labs, nuclear power. Nowadays when you say "tech" everyone thinks of software and phone apps or whatever, but it used to mean all sorts of machines.

[@zebo-the-fat]

Not what I expected at all!

[@stevenhavener7327]

Awesome !! thank you best regards Steve

[@eugenezagidullin4893]

SX-70 camera while having a fully electronic shutter utilizes pneumatics to limit the speed of travel of the shutter plate (not the exposure, it's a bit more complicated). The actuating solenoid armature also acts as a plunger and the solenoid itself has an adjustable valve

[@jimsvideos7201]

The foot-driven spot metering is charming but I wouldn’t want to use it thirty times daily for a lifetime.

[@PaleoWithFries]

Wow, was this thing altitude sensitive?

[@kidmohair8151]

your frequency of uploads does not dint my enthusiasm for your channel. work at the pace that is right for you.

[@joelfenner]

The variable air-metering orifice on the galvanometer is *possibly* inspired by a similar design found in player piano spoolbox motor governors (and perhaps other things of similar vintage) ca. 1920. The player-piano design employs an actual constant-pressure regulator in tandem with the variable geometry metering orifice, whereas it looks like the polaroid 440 skips that in favor of using the spring+bellows combination as the entire power source. Still, the parallel is a bit uncanny. One doesn't see a lot of pneumatically-actuated stuff like this, and the purely pneumatic nature of a lot of that vintage of self-playing musical instruments makes me wonder if one of the engineers who originally worked on this was a holdover from that era.

[@Zbigniew_Nowak]

Indeed, an interesting idea. Before the days of electronics, engineers had to be inventive.

[@ddegn]

Aren't you a bit early for an *April Fool's* video? That mechanism seems impossible. The mechanism looks like something someone would make up as a gag Rube Goldberg mechanism. Thanks for showing and explaining it to us. It blew my mind.

[@craigd1275]

@ 3:52 $49.95 in the 1960's is about $500 today. That is a lot for a camera attachment. But I think there are thermal and nightvision attachments for iPhones that are a lot more money.

[@richardbrobeck2384]

really cool !

[@steveaustin62]

Oh man that was a time when cunning meant thinking in mechanical terms rather than code. Ever come across a Burroughs P series adding machine?

[@NoosaHeads]

I collect Polaroid equipment, but i don't have this accessory. They really were a forward thinking company. Such a pity that Polavision effectively ruined them. The SX70 is still one of my most favourite cameras of all time.

[@waltertomashefsky2682]

I never knew that Rube Goldberg worked for Polaroid in the 50’s 😁

[@patrickshannon4854]

Land & his design staff must have been some very clever people, open to innovative & original solutions to technical challenges. Do you have knowledge of how the company was organized to favor such wide ranging engineering disciplines & combine them to produce a brilliantly designed product?

[@erikdenhouter]

Olympus Trip 35 has a selenium photocell with a mechanical ramp mechanism for auto exposure. But not with air like this one.

[@dwiggang4290]

Yes, and that "trap the needle and then feel for its position" was quite common in the electro-mechanical era of autoexposure. Most used and shutter that also served as the iris, where at high shutter speeds the shutter blades only opened partually and only at slow speeds (~1/30th) would they open fully.

[@erikdenhouter]

@@dwiggang4290 "Trap the needle and then feel for its position", good description. That is the mechanism that allows to measure first, keep the button down on that setting, and then frame and shoot. A bit like we see with the Polaroid in the video.

[@GrrAargh1]

I take it you mean 'adjust the focus ' rather than 'adjust the zoom'

[@bartpi77]

2:41 distance rather than zoom. But anyway great channel 👍

[@E1nsty]

Needs a hydraulic line shutter lever extension for that 5x engineering cred.

[@bobthecomputerguy]

F-54, that is one narrow aperture.

[@jimsvideos7201]

It doesn’t translate directly to 35mm systems though, if that helps.

[@user-br9fx5nl8m]

With a large format camera (like a 4x5 or 8x10 or larger) f54 is not unheard of, it can even go down to f128 and more.

[@bobthecomputerguy]

@ Yeah, that makes sense. They're getting so much more light than a 35mm or cropped DSLR.

[@TheWhatnought]

I... I need to do more research on that shutter system and it's circuits. 1960's solar cells were good enough for LCD calculators but man, there's quite a lot of stuff going on in that system. It's like RTG's that put out 80W but can power a radio installation or lighthouse miles away from anything. (sry. portal tried to warn me of this. I really need to look into extremely low voltage systems. they seem unreal.)

[@ssolomon999]

It’s very clever, but doesn’t seem like it could be accurate enough to actually be useful, relative to much simpler solutions. My evidence is the fact that they added that adjustment knob - I presume they wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t think users would need it. So, if you need the knob anyway, how’s that any easier than the typical solution of linking the knob to the light meter? (i.e., turn the knob until the needle points to the indicator, which sets the shutter speed or aperture or both). Also, since it only works on film with a single specified ASA (at the time, ISO now), the mechanism is essentially just applying the “sunny 16” rule which was included in all packs if Kodak film and works pretty well. (use ASA as shutter speed, set aperture to f16 for full sun, f11 for clouds, etc.)

[@ssolomon999]

Entertaining / interesting video though!

[@devroombagchus7460]

Weird, what they came up with to take fuzzy, low contrast pictures.

[@esalehtismaki]

Make the camera oversimplified and then sell an additional device to make it more useable.

[@Curt_Sampson]

Depends on the user. I would prefer not to use such a device in most circumstances, and judge the shutter speed I need using a light meter and experience with the camera. (And I know better photographers than me who don't even need a light meter!) And of course, there's also the trade-offs from using it. Not only does it cost money, but being to use only a fast B/W film and an f/54 aperture is pretty restrictive.

[@user-br9fx5nl8m]

It was pretty advanced stuff for the day

[@davidbrennan660]

….. it gives it a 40 Watt range… .

[@KA-jm2cz]

Here is video from Ukraine front that showcasing functon of Soviet signal rocket that makes flare gun obsolete and was/is key element of their tactics: kzbin.info/www/bejne/opKsmK2prJl2fKsfeature=shared I just think that you and weivers can be intetested about that marvelous little practical dokument. Very informative guy.

[@charlesurrea1451]

Bon

[@frogz]

2 views 3 minutes ago? you're slipping errr i mean im early! that's a really interesting but kinda convoluted way of doing things in all aspects!

[@WOFFY-qc9te]

Agricultural engineering but easily manufactured from punch sheet. Convoluted describes is well. When Polaroid made the ultrasonic range finder it was so optimised for manufacturing and cheap that it was used in budget distance measures, then burglar alarms. They probably made more a lot of dosh from licensing

[@veritypickle8471]

FOIST