Just Curious: How did Film Packs and Adapters work?

[Donald Qualls]

I've heard that story too, but I doubt it because Polaroid Pack film is essentially put together the same way, so unless these ladies went to work for Dr. Land it is something that can be automated.

Well, the "rest of the story" is that by then, around 1982, the sales of pack film had dropped off to the point it wasn't economical for Kodak to have machinery built to automate film pack, er, packing. Polaroid had always done it that way.

I agree, it *should* be pretty simple -- in the dark, machinery sticks each negative to the tab/backing, collates tab/negative sets in numeric order (probably from different strip lines -- so each machine has a roll of tabs numbered, say, "12", and you have sixteen tab-sticking machines to make sixteen exposure film packs, plus one with the "dark slide" tab), staples the backing at a corner that's pre-notched to make it pull out predictably, then bends the stack over a bar, slides it off the end of the bar, and stuffs the ends into the pack on each side of the pack's pivot bar, finally latching the film end to the inside of the pack. I'd expect the packs to be blow-molded plastic these days, rather than metal (lighter, FAR cheaper, and they wouldn't take a permanent bend if dropped), but the pivot bar would probably still have to be metal, or at least a metal tube over a plastic post, for stiffness. They *should* be a good bit cheaper to put together than Polaroid packs, because there's no print, chemical pod, or need to interleave things with the double-tab system that Polaroid requires.

Given I can buy 3x4 Polaroid for just over $1 per exposure, I'd think 4x5 pack film could be made competitive with major brand 4x5 sheet film -- *if* there were a market. With modern adhesives (easier to cleanly remove the film from the backing -- heck, a masking tape paster like the one in 120 would be just about perfect), materials (very thin, completely opaque tab material like that used for 120 backing, blow-molded black plastic pack box), and equipment (computer controlled, IR machine vision systems to ensure the parts are all going together properly in the dark, IR night vision inespection), the only thing really preventing it is the capital cost of setting up a new film cutting/packaging line in days when film has been seen as waning.

Ilford might be the ideal company to approach about this, or find out who rolls the 120 for companies like Freestyle, that rebrand film (assuming it's not the original manufacturer -- I think not, because .EDU Ultra uses a different spool from Foma branded 120) -- heck, I'd *love* to be able to shoot pack film in my Speed Graphic; I could carry enough film and advance rapidly enough to use it as a real press camera. One *could* even package color that way, though I don't know if there are enough who do their own C-41 to make that practical.

An alternative might be to produce a roll film back to fit International slide-lock camera backs, that uses 4 inch wide film and has a rapid advance with a longish roll. If you have capacity for, say, twenty feet of film, that'd be about 48 exposures, equivalent to three packs of film on a roll a couple inches in diameter. Packed with paper cap and tail like 220, you could load and unload in daylight, even...

[Greg Lockrey]

An alternative might be to produce a roll film back to fit International slide-lock camera backs, that uses 4 inch wide film and has a rapid advance with a longish roll. If you have capacity for, say, twenty feet of film, that'd be about 48 exposures, equivalent to three packs of film on a roll a couple inches in diameter. Packed with paper cap and tail like 220, you could load and unload in daylight, even...

Or a roll just the same length as a 35mm of 36 or about 50" or so to give you 10 shots. Never understood why there wasn't one either when you have long roll arial cameras.

[David A. Goldfarb]

I've seen a rollfilm holder for my 5x7" Press Graflex, which used 5" rolls with a paper backing like 120 and had a red window for frame numbers, so it's been done.

[Donald Qualls]

Yep, there was a standard roll format that fit a Graflex-made roll holder for 4x5 cameras, too -- 5" wide, paper backed, with spools constructed similar to 122, 124, etc. -- wooden core, with metal ends. Kodak made at least one 4x5 roll camera with 4" wide film around the turn of the 20th century, and sold film in that format for quite a while. Those formats, however, were all obsolete before WWII, AFAIK -- it was actually faster to use double-sided film holders and cut film, than it was to look down at the camera back and advance to the next barely-visible number in a red window (and the red window was virtually impossible to use in bad light, when you might get fine photographs with flash -- not really a problem in 1910 because flash wasn't used often outside studios in flash powder days, but a real issue by the 1930s).

What I actually had in mind was a roll carrier with an automatic film advance, either a clicking counter like the one in my Adapt-a-Roll (count three clicks for 6x6 or four for 6x9), or a lever wind or self-stopping advance like the ones in later versions of Graphic roll backs or my Super Ikonta B. Mechanically, it'd be dead simple to build one by copying the mechanism used in the Adapt-a-Roll -- a cam on a friction roller, pushrod actuated pawl on a ratchet wheel, and external counter scale separate from the advance knob -- for which any patents must have expired decades ago. One could even add a cam to the counter shaft to make such a unit self-stopping...