This lil 16mm is from the early 70’s sometime, bought on ebay as untested but works great, looks barely used, in the sexy black paint job too! I really like this guy, very functional and the finish is nice. There’s some protruding plastic unlike the earlier minolta 16’s but it feels very solid. The lower plastic body appears to be glass-reinforced. plus it’s SO cute. As of 2024 these are real cheap on ebay and a very fun camera to play with if you don’t mind dealing with the film.
Vitals:
- Shutter Speeds: 1/30 and 1/250
- The slow speed is I think intended mainly for flash sync (there’s no shoe on this guy, but there’s a PC port that coupled to some bespoke electronic and flashbulb units)
- There’s a lil red flag in the viewfinder to let you know you switched to 1/30
- The lens is equivalent to something like a 65mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera, so if you’re hand-holding at 1/30 without a flash, try and be extra stable.
- Aperature: f/3.5 - f/22
- No auto exposure, but coupled meter with nice blinkey LEDs in the viewfinder
The LEDs are REALLY SMALL at the top of the viewfinder and kinda hard to see, I thought mine weren’t working at first. - Zone focus with teeny indicator in viewfinder (so cute!)
Film:
My first test shots have been done on single perf’d 16mm Kodak Vision 250D cine film. This camera has a bigger frame size than some other 16mm subminis so you’ll need to load it with unperfed or single perfed film. If you use single perf, the perforations should face the bridge of the cartridge (which will end up on the bottom of the camera). It’s important to make sure you roll the film and tape it to the spool the correct way, I did my first test roll with the sprocket holes on the wrong side and can confirm that they will intrude on the frame (it looks cool, so by all means go for it if you want). The film goes in special cartridges that look like minox carts. You can get originals on ebay or order 3d prints (I ordered SLA prints using this stl file from jlcpcb, but you can also order them already printed). See my mamiya page for some thoughts on processing 16mm film.
Seals:
I replaced the foam with 1/16” black EVA foam from the craft store. I spray-adhesived the foam before cutting an just stuck it on in place. The old foam I scraped off with toothpicks and q-tips w/ lighter fluid. There’s two foam strips, one by the hinge and one along the edge of the battery compartment (they don’t really seem strictly necessary for light-proofing, maybe they’re for dust?). There’s also two foam disks which apparently gently push the film cartridge into the body to hold everything in place.
Meter & Battery
The battery is some wacky 3v alkaline thing that I think you can get a replacement for, but I just used a 3v lithium coin battery and a stack of literal coins which seems to work fine. I read somewhere that the replacements for these are usually just lithium batteries shrink-wrapped to a spacer anyways. Meter seems to read pretty accurately (haven’t checked against a meter, but seems pretty sunny-16 accurate). The ISO appears to be adjustable in 1/3 stops so you could probably compensate for an inaccurate meter pretty easily.
I’ve noticed (at least in my copy) that the meter LEDs can be pretty hard to see if your eyeball isn’t in exactly the right place relative to the viewfinder. Also sometimes it seems like I have to kinda wiggle the silver meter button to get it to close correctly (maybe the contacts need cleaning). Also, the meter only works if the lens cover is open. All that being said, I thought my meter was broken at first, but it turns out I was just holding it wrong 🙃.
