Disc 3600

This is probably one of my biggest disappointments in old cameras. I bought it when I was first getting started into film photography, when I was kinda fascinated with all the different formats film had been in. I'd already bought my Vivitar 110 camera that I'd enjoyed, and I'd shot with my partner's Everflash 126 camera, so I figured Disc film should be next on my adventure. So I bought the cheapest functional camera I could find on ebay, plus 4 discs of Fuji Superia HR, got it all loaded up, and took it out shooting. I only got one shot with it though, as something in the motor advance broke, and I was left with a camera constantly winding but not actually advancing. It hadn't been too expensive at least, but it was still real disappointing.

The camera itself is somewhat interesting in the context of the rest of Kodak's disc line. Disc film was Kodak's attempt to follow up on the rather successful 110 format, by introducing film with even smaller negatives, and a novel physical format to get attention. It was the 1980s, discs were cool, or so thought Kodak at least. It was an odd choice to say the least, as film discs were much bigger than 110 carts or even 35mm cassettes, with their only advantage being how thin they are. So you ended up with bigger but thinner cameras, with tiny negatives that necessitated tiny expensive lenses. In addition, Kodak intended for prints to be made using their new, expensive 6-element enlarging lenses, but few labs wanted to pay for new lenses for an unproven format, so prints were made on 35mm enlarging setups, which certainly didn't help it's reputation for poor print quality. The only film available, so far as I can tell, was 200 ISO color negative from Kodak, Fuji, 3M, and Konica, who all ended production in the late-90s, with Kodak being the last selling Disc film. Kodak ended production in 1999, 10+ years after the last Disc camera was sold, and Disc film has since been all but forgotten.

The Disc 3600 was released a few years after the launch of the format, and has a few differences compared to the rest of Kodak's line. For starters, it uses easily replaceable AA batteries, as opposed to the soldered in lithium batteries used by most other Disc cameras on the market. I've heard that the lithium cells are the same as CR123A batteries, so it should be possible to solder in your own replacements, but I've not tried this myself. The other big difference is that it uses a 15mm f/4 lens, as opposed to the 12.5mm f/2.8 lens that was standard on most Kodaks, and a majority of the other Disc cameras of the time. The 15mm lens gives a field of view close to a 60mm lens on a 35 camera, so a mild telephoto. I don't know of another Kodak camera that uses this lens, though the Kodak Tele Disc uses a 12.5mm f/4 lens, and between that, shared use of AA batteries, and the physical similarities in both cameras, I suspect that the two share a lot of their parts. Maybe one day I'll be able to find a Tele Disc to handle and confirm my theory, but I'm not really looking to actually acquire more disc cameras.

Because I only got one shot before it broke, and I seem to have since misplaced that particular disc, there are no sample shots. Disc film is designed such that you can swap discs mid-roll (mid-spin?) and not lose any shots, so I may one day find it and shoot it in another camera, and then post my single shot, but until then, if you want to see tiny shots on 40 year old film, go check my page for the Minolta Disc K.