6 Frames - Does It Work?
December 31, 2022
- Where: Somewhere in Munich and at a lake somewhere in Bavaria
- Camera: Minox 35 GT
- Lens: Color-Minotar f/2.8, 35mm
- Film: Kodak Double X
- Scan: Nikon Super Coolscan 9000
A while ago, at a local flea market, I managed to find a Minox 35 GT (together with a flash unit) in decent shape. I brought it home, put a battery in it, and gave it a try. It didn’t work. It looked like sometimes the shutter would fire but get stuck in an open state, and sometimes nothing happened at all. The reaction from the battery test button on the camera looked normal to me, so I concluded that the camera is broken. I gave fixing the Minox the old school try, following instructions I found for the problem that the camera exhibited. Or so I thought. It did not help and I gave up.
During one of my visits to my parents in the far north, my father dug up some of his old film cameras. Mostly point-and-shoot cameras, as he had given me all his other cameras already. To my surprise, he did have a Minox 35 GT in immaculate condition. It seems like he lost interest in the camera back in the day because a lab technician was saying very bad things about it after he handed bad results back to my father. So now I was (and still am) in possession of two Minox 35 GT, one that should be working perfectly. Back at home, I popped in a fresh battery and gave the camera a try. It did not work. While disappointed, I did some more research and bought a battery adapter for 4xLR44 batteries in the hope that those would work better than the other type of battery would. Jackpot! The camera came to life and the shutter finally did what it was supposed to do. Not I am left with the camera that I bought at the flea market. Maybe it has the same problem? I have not tried it, yet. First, I wanted to see what the camera I got from my father could do when taken out to shoot “around town”.
The images in this post are from the first test roll that I shot with the Minox 35 GT. I am using Kodak Double X at EV 250, which is my go-to test film since I still have a couple of hand-spooled rolls left. After shooting a few rolls of Double X, I have some mixed opinions about it. The latitude is a bit tricky to deal with and the images tend to be quite grainy. On the other hand, it was cheap enough when I bought it, so it does not hurt so much when a test roll turns out to be for the bin.
The results that the Minox 35 GT produced on Double X are a bit mixed, too. The exposures are fine in some images, under or over-exposed in others. The camera is capable of delivering some surprisingly sharp pictures when everything is going the right way. I am sure that it can be a good everyday companion, given that its user spends some time learning how it reacts to different lighting situations. Overall, I like that little thing and I am happy to have it in my collection. Twice.
