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Connealy
Tinkerer
Username: Connealy
Post Number: 77
Registered: 02-2008
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, March 16, 2013 - 09:46 am: | 
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I posted this query recently in the 828 Group at Flickr, but there seems to be only me and one other guy there and an answer to the question seems unlikely.
In a full-frame image from my Flash Bantam you can see two little bumps in the image along the upper right border of the image. Those two bumps correspond to two little notches in the frame mask. My pre-war Bantam 4.5 has the same notches and so does the Bantam Special from the same era.
It turns out that the little notches are not exclusive to the Bantam line. My two Kodak 35 cameras have them too -- though in one case there are three notches rather than two.
So what was Kodak up to here? Was the purpose to embed some kind of code in the image on the film? Were the notches a kind of artifact of the construction/assembly process? I'm stumped. |
Br1078lum
Tinkerer
Username: Br1078lum
Post Number: 506
Registered: 11-2010
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, March 16, 2013 - 05:15 pm: |
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May have been some sort of code that Kodak used when post-processing the film, which determined what type of slide mount was used (on chromes). Could also be convenient to the owner to know what camera they used. I've seen negs from other cameras with similar markings, and then there are the Agfa's that just had a ruffle edge. I don't think it wound up being an industry-wide practice, Mike, though it does mimic the knotches on large format film.
PF |
Connealy
Tinkerer
Username: Connealy
Post Number: 78
Registered: 02-2008
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, March 17, 2013 - 05:25 am: |
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I think you are likely on the right track with those ideas. The first thing that came to me was the notches on sheet film, but those would have produced black bumps intruding on the image area. As I recall from my early darkroom days, those notches were mainly for properly positioning the emulsion side of the sheet film in the holders.
If the purpose was to encode information for something like slide mounting, it seems like it would have to involve some optical sensing and automated processing. I guess that was a possibility in the late 1930s, though I've never seen any good descriptions of Kodak's processing technology from that era. I guess I could try to contact the Kodak museum in Rochester to see what they have on the subject. |
Clay
Tinkerer
Username: Clay
Post Number: 47
Registered: 12-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, March 17, 2013 - 07:22 am: |
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Newspapers notched them so that the layout guys and
printers knew which photographer to credit.
Best regards,
/Clay |
Biloraguy
Tinkerer
Username: Biloraguy
Post Number: 3
Registered: 06-2013
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, June 10, 2013 - 12:20 pm: |
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Clay is right. I remember big city press photogs filing notches in their Rolleiflexes so people knew the film came from their camera not somebody else's. I assume they did it earlier to Speed Graphics, too. |
