Coronet Folding Rollfilm Camera Cheap and cheerful
A rollfilm camera from a company that claimed to produce ‘ the cheapest cameras in the world’
The word ‘amateur’ implies someone who does something for the love of it, rather than to earn a living, and by that definition there’s no doubt that I am an amateur photographer, even though I also write for Amateur Photographer. I take pictures to please myself, and it’s great if other people sometimes like them, but that’s not why I take them – which is just as well when you see this shot of a newly wed couple cutting the cake (right). Of course, had I been planning to do some serious photography at the wedding I probably wouldn’t have chosen to use a battered old folding camera, and if I had decided to use it I hope I would have been more diligent with my ‘pre-flight checks’. If this were the case I would have spotted the 1mm pinhole in the bellows, which was enough to all but annihilate most of the eight negatives on the roll, with this example being the least affected by some margin. Based in Birmingham, the Coronet Camera Company was in business for around 40 years, and in that time it made an impressive array of budget cameras, with more than 50 models bearing the Coronet name. One of the company’s advertising slogans was ‘Coronet – the cheapest cameras in the world’, which to today’s ears comes across as a bit of a mixed message. The Coronet Folding Rollfilm camera was introduced in 1926, and was made with variations for a number of years. These cameras weren’t just cheap – they were also incredibly basic. The manufacturers didn’t feel the need to burden their users with details about lens focal length or aperture, or even shutter speed. A lever slides between ‘I’ for instantaneous and ‘ T’ for time, and that is the only setting you need to, or indeed can, make. This is probably one of the earliest cameras I acquired. I think I got it from a Scouts’ jumble sale around 1970, and it’s been boxed or on display ever since, but I’ve not tried it with film until now. Compared with 35mm the negatives seem huge, but you’ve got to remember that at this level of consumer photography enlargements would have been a rarity, and contact prints were the norm – a fact easily confirmed if you ever stumble across an old photo album from his era, where the prints will generally be 21∕ 4x31∕2in, or 6x9cm in today’s terms. These little prints seem tiny, but oddly enough they are roughly the same size as the new Instax Mini format that has been surprisingly popular in recent months.
Even without the light leak, I wasn’t expecting great things from this camera, so I didn’t want to use expensive new film. I opted instead to load it with one of my stash of very expired Fujichrome Velvia slide films, and cross-processed it in C41 chemicals. The cross-processing explains the green colour cast, but I’m afraid I have to take full responsibility for the catastrophic technical failure.
‘These cameras weren’t just cheap – they were basic’