Minolta 16 PS Miniature Camera

My latest camera is a bit of a surprise being a medium format buff. You can see more info here at collection-appereils.fr (requires translation).

Minolta 16 PS

It is a simple camera with 1/100s shutter speed (1/30th in flash setting) and variable aperture (f3.5 to f16) and fixed focus with a view finder. It takes 20 photos from a roll of 16mm (that's right movie) film. The small cartridges are reloadable. The one I bought did not include a film cartridge but happily I found a couple of rolls of film on ebay from Germany. One is color the other Kodak Plus-X. Both were from the 1980s. I took the roll of the black and white on a trip to London last weekend and developed it at home. These were quick snaps to burn through the film so I could reload some fresher film.

I developed them as a wad of film using semi-stand development. My spiral reel cannot accept this small film so I wadded it up in the tank. (I have since found an old tank and reel that takes 16mm film.) This worked OK for most shots but some were clearly touching other parts of the film. I use semi-stand for old film as it works in most cases. I used 3ml of Ilford LC29 in 300ml of water. I let stand 30 minutes before rotating the tank once and letting it stand another 30 minutes. Stop and fix as normal.

I tried to make a couple of prints. The film being old is grainy and low contrast. Being very small I had the enlarger to its full extension. I figured out cutting 8x10 paper in half to 8x5 allows me to place a 6x4 image with good size borders around the edges.

The results are below.