$3 Disposable Camera

For awhile now, I have talked about how much more I love film than digital sensors for photographic capture. I was interested to see whether the worst possible film camera could outpace digital point-and-shoot cameras in terms of image quality. So I bought the Fujifilm Quicksnap Outdoor, a disposable camera from Walmart, for a whopping three dollars. Combine this with a cheap scanner that will do film scans ($30 on ebay) and you could buy 30 of these and take over 800 photos before you reached the cost of your average point-and-shoot digital camera. And if you're careful like I am when I shoot film (because each photograph costs money), you could take pictures on these for a couple years, which is about the time people usually upgrade their digital cameras anyway.

You get a total of 27 exposures on 800 ISO Fuji Superia X-TRA 35mm film. As far as I can tell, the camera's aperture is a fixed f/10 while the shutter speed is a fixed 1/125 of a second. In broad daylight, this camera would theoretically overexpose the film 3 to 4 stops, which is fine because of the exposure latitude of color negative film. Because of the fast film, it could handle various semi-low lighting conditions.

You have zero control over exposure and you can barely tell that a picture has been made when you press the shutter because it barely snaps. There's no flash on it either, so you get what you get. You also get a minimum focusing distance of 3 feet or so and everything from there until infinity is basically in focus. So you get no depth of field control either. If it's in the frame, you'll know what it is.

What I should have done was make the same images on my cheap Fuji digital camera and compare. But, this thing is so easy to carry around that I just left it in my car and snapped photos as I felt the need. No way I was going to lug around another camera all the time too. Maybe next time.

And now for the results. I took this to a local photo lab and had the negatives scanned on automatic settings on a Fuji Frontier scanner at the lowest resolution possible. It cost me an extra $2.50. Let's be honest...I wasn't expecting much. But I was expecting the images to exceed the quality of photos I see on most people's facebook pages, snapped with their $200 digital point-and-shoot cameras--because film is magical, even at the mercy of a plastic lens.

Here's the rundown.

As you might imagine with a plastic lens, the images are somewhat sharp(ish) in the middle with varying degrees of softness as you go out toward the edges. Image distortion at the fringes? Yes. A little unsharp all over? Yes. Grainy due to the high speed of the film? Yes, although I imagine with a high-resolution scan, some of the "grain" would really end up being pixels from a low-res scan.

Are the images as good or better than a majority of the snaps people post on their blogs or facebook profiles? I think so. Most of the point-and-shoot photos I see around the web are blurry, washed out, low resolution (people often shoot on small jpeg mode anyway to maximize the number of pictures on a memory card)....AND have blown out specular highlights due to the limitations of digital capture.

Will I be buying more of these? Yes. I'm particularly interested in the Kodak version using the BW 400CN film, which film I love very much. I'll be getting one soon! So snag one of these and enjoy the benefits of film for $3! See if you don't get converted!