Mido Film Holders Reborn???

[Drew Wiley]

There were two distinctly different series of Mido holders. The earlier version used a vinyl sleeve over the film. The second version was like a thin regular double sheet film holder, with a separate clamshell spacer. This saves about a third your usual carry weight on half a dozen holders, and takes up less pack space too. I never got along with the earlier type. But I still have a dozen of the second 4x5 version along with two clamshells. These never got much use because not terribly long after, Readyload and Quikload paks came out, yet with growing pains of their own. With the Mido system you have to be careful that no light leaks get between the clamshell and the inner holder itself, once the darkslide is pulled. I had a few minor accidents with them, but overall, bagged most of my shots just fine. Hard to say if I'll use them again. He apparently made very few 5x7 and 8x10 holders.

[Drew Bedo]

There could be a viable Kickstarter project here.

Any one who takes a LF kitg into the field will love to save weight.

Anyone using a format other than 4x5, 5x7 or 8x10 would love a light weight, affordable film holder.

What about an open sourced file for 3D printing?

[MikeS]

Hi All.

This is my first post since re-joining the forum, I've been away from it for almost 10 years! Does anyone have pictures of the Mido II system they could post? I have a 4x5 Mido setup that I had basically almost forgotten about until just the other day. I've been fairly ill, and continue to be so, and because of this my Linhof has become almost too heavy for me to handle anymore, so foolishly without doing enough checking I decided to get a Travelwide! Of course missing the kickstarter put me at the mercy of the used market, so I managed to buy a TW setup with the 'proper' 90mm Angulon (I already had a few of my own, but what the heck, it saved me the effort of doing all the calibration as this one was installed by the folks that made the Travelwide, & had just had a CLA, something none of mine have had lately). I primarily shoot my Linhof handheld, and focus using the coupled rangefinder, so I primarily use grafmatics, and in fact I have about a dozen or so of them. After finding out that the tw won't use the grafmatics without major surgery, I pulled out the case that has my 'regular' cut film holders, I only have maybe 5 or 6 of them, and most of them are 9x12 with only 1 being 4x5. They turned out to be my next big let down. While their outside dimensions are all identical even tho they're for 2 different film sized, apparently Linhof film holders are a slightly different size than the US standard for 4x5 film holders, first off they're as thick as a grafmatic even tho they only hold 2 sheets of film, but worse yet, they're too tall to fit inside the walls of the travelwide's back!

Now comes the point of this message, while reading thru the 45 page long travelwide mods thread on this, and in passing somebody mentions the idea of remaking the Mido holders, and that gets me thinking that I have a Mido holder, and 5 film holders that each hold 2 sheets of 4x5 film. Until reading this thread I didn't realize that I actually had the earlier Mido system that more closely resembles a Fuji quickload or Kodak readyload in operation except that it's double sided, so it's probably more like the earlier kodak readyloads that were dual sided, but I'm not sure of that, I've never seen a dual sided readyload, and of course because you load your own film in it, you can have any 4x5 film that's available, and not limited like with the other 2 systems. I have the Mido holder along with the 5 film holders, along with an instruction sheet all in a Kodak Readyload box, and the film holders each have a plastic bag to keep them clean, when I put the Mido holder into the travelwide, it fit like a hand going into a glove! I was truly amazed at how well the holder fit into the travelwide camera, so I loaded a couple of the film holders with some Ilford Ortho+ and when we get some nice weather on a day I'm feeling healthy enough to get out I'm going to try the system out! If this doesn't work out, then it's back to modifying the travelwide to accept my grafmatics!

-MikeS

[EdSawyer]

Welcome back! Personally, I'd scrap the travelwide and get something better that will take all the holders you want. Something like a Cambo Wide with a 90mm lens on it.

[Drew Wiley]

I sold off my sleeve-type Mido system years ago and replaced it with the Mido II clamshell system, but then largely forgot about that once the Quickload & REadyload concept was perfected. I should probably sell of the Mido gear one of these days. One more task on the backburner. It worked fine if you were careful, but I never used it much. Besides Quickload, I got heavily addicted to 8X10 for quite awhile.

[xkaes]

There were actually TWO versions of the ORIGINAL Mido holder. Even most Mido users don't know this. These holders are not marked as "Model 1", "Type 1", etc. in any way. They are just called Mido holders. But this is common in photography. A company develops a camera, such as Nikon with the FM. They didn't call it the FM1, but when they developed an "improved" version, they called it the FM2. Same with the original Mido holder. Mido came out with a II holder, but there were two versions of the I holder. It is basically impossible to visually tell the difference -- you need to look at the instruction sheet. It has a diagram of the holder with dashed lines where you have to adjust the holder for use.

If anyone has any Mido I (version 2) holders that they want to sell, I'm might be interested if the price is right. You'll need to have the original instruction sheet to determine what you have.

[Wayne]

Did Mr K pass away again?

[duff photographer]

Did Mr K pass away again?

No. He was ill for a while but got back to his feet again. It's assumed he's still knocking around somewhere (at least he was about a year ago).

[Ivan J. Eberle]

Compactness is nice, but did MIDO film holders hold a candle to Quickload/Readyload for dust control? (As in, what were the sleeves composed of and is it anti-static?) Dust is a huge problem in the Desert SW

[Willie]

Compactness is nice, but did MIDO film holders hold a candle to Quickload/Readyload for dust control? (As in, what were the sleeves composed of and is it anti-static?) Dust is a huge problem in the Desert SW

My Uncle used them when he was teaching in College in Bishop, CA. Would go through Death Valley, through Nevada, Utah and Idaho deserts as well as Anza Borrego area in SoCal using them in 4x5. He really liked them and found no dust problems in use. He kept things clean. Only reason he has stopped using them is he moved to larger film sizes.