Kodak Pony camera

Preamble

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Smena camera line, of which I had two models. The early model, known simply as Smena, wasn’t in hand. Enter Maxsold. Maxsold runs local online auctions in Canada and some areas in the US. It is mainly meant for estate or downsizing sales, where, after the valuables are removed, Maxsold agents come in and list what needs to go, from armoires to coat hangers and list it on a local online auction. This includes cameras at random, so I check nearby auctions, and every now and then I score. Nonetheless, some two-bit local merchants and other fly-by-night list their wares there, mostly what remains unsold for a warranted reason. In this particular case, I bid and won a Smena. Pickup was a tad shady, at the back entrance of a massage parlour, and the camera came in an aftermarket case, which wasn’t specified in the listing. Coming home, I realized the reason for the generosity: only the front half of the camera was there; the back had been pried off, leaving the sides badly scarred. The listing described it as “Wear: Light scratches/surface wear”. It happened to me before with Maxsold with an Asahiflex, so I should have expected it. Unlike other auction sites where one can leave feedback, here each sale is supposed to be a one-off; no provision for reviews. Was I disappointed? Not really; it was going cheap, and crooks sprout everywhere, so I consider this a tuition fee.

Why is this described here? A few weeks ago I picked up a camera bundle from Maxsold, where a Pony 828 was still on my bench, waiting to be united with its two siblings on the shelf. The Pony and the Smena are the same class: both entry-level, no-frills cameras, just from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.

#828 film format

Kodak made over a thousand camera models since the late 1800s, when photography was the domain of specialists and artists. Early models were mahogany and brass, exquisitely hand-crafted, and priced as match, or down-to-earth box models, still made of wood and leather. In the early 1900s, camera sizes began to shrink with the folding models, yet they were much larger than today’s compacts. These camera bodies prevailed until Kodak introduced the vest-pocket cameras in the late 1920s, using the #127 roll film format, which was small enough for a carried-around camera yet sufficient for contact printing and early enlargers. As a side note, in Japan the #127 format was called ‘best’, a local pronunciation of ‘vest’.

Leitz disrupted the paper-backed harmony with 35mm perforated film, which Nagel perfected with the #135 cartridge. The common #127, #120, and several other obscure Kodak formats were used in compact folders until Kodak bought Nagel, which brought in the famed 35mm Retina line.  As optics evolved, camera makers moved toward monobloc bodies, with Kodak offering the Bantam and Kodak 35 series. While Europe had adopted the 35mm perforated format, Kodak had created the #828 format, the same 35mm width, but paper-backed, and hence shorter rolls. I could understand that Kodak could not dominate the #135 market, so they created their own small-frame format, but they already had the #127 half-frame format version, almost identical to the #828, only in a different orientation. See table below.

What I cannot understand is why Kodak engineers stuck to the metric convention for their film formats, when they and the entire country used the imperial measuring system. Bolta used a similar paper-backed 35mm film in the Photavit, but it had marks for 24x24mm frames. Some makers offered such a format in Japan as well.

The Kodak Pony

The war had come and gone, and the folders gave way to the much smaller so-called klapp cameras. This style allowed for high-end specs, but so did the price. To cater to the growing crowd of amateur photographers, Kodak introduced the Pony 828 camera in 1949, a simple-to-use, comfortably priced camera.

Kodak made the Pony 828 for about a decade, and introduced the Pony 135, a sister model, just a year later, and sold both side by side. With several submodels. The dynasty lasted from 1949 to 1962 including two French-made models by Pathe, .

At the time, camera designers went wild with body styles, such as the Argus C3, Argus A2F, Perfex Candid, or Detrola. With the Pony, Kodak stayed with a traditional style, no fireworks or outrageous design elements.

The Pony had several submodels that all looked similar, with variants marked as such, making them easy to identify.

There is not much to say about the camera. It is as straightforward as it can be: no fancy settings, just what was required at the time. The models are well marked, and the most noticeable difference between the 828 and the 135 is the missing rewind button on the latter.

• The body is also minimalist, made of two-tone Bakelite with a metal (?) breastplate.
• The retractable lens pulls out and locks in place with a slight right turn.
• The 828 has a film memo dial where you’d expect to find the rewind knob. The 135 has it by the viewer, neatly balanced at the other side by the manual reset frame counter.
• The winder just pulls the film strip; it does not cock the shutter. The trigger is on top of the body, by the viewer bulge.
• The aperture selector and the shutter speed fins are set on both sides of a curved strip on top of the lens assembly; it takes a strong fingernail to set.
• In between the fins is the shutter cocking lever, a bit hard to reach but forgivable.
• The removable back releases with an odd sliding lever that requires pressing a tiny spring and sliding it down.
• A green frame counter lens is in the back, matching panchromatic It does not exist in the 135 models.

For the collector, it is an unimportant camera. Other than self-spooling, no film is available for it. Many Pony models are offered for sale at a moderate price, so it is a good seed camera for a budding collector, or a part of an Americana camera collection.

Kodak Pony family list