At only 16mm wide, 110 film is pretty small and was mostly used in very simple, inexpensive cameras.  It went out of production a number of years ago, but has begun being made again recently by Lomography.  It was never hugely popular and is still a difficult film to process and scan, but the end result of all this means the film and cameras which use it are relatively inexpensive to get hold of.

The film drops easily into the back of the camera and the same slider that opens the lens cover also winds the film on.  From that point you select a sun or cloud depending on the available light and click the shutter button hoping for the best.  There are only a couple of apertures and shutter speeds, so a brightly-lit scene is pretty much a necessity.

There is no battery and no electronics in this early version, so I can only guess that the shutter and aperture are controlled by what you select on the sun and cloud slider.  The are four options and four combinations, but I don’t know the precise order.

There’s a flash socket for hot-shoe flashes, which doubles as a holder for a neat breast-pocket clip.  There is also a wrist strap which unscrews to reveal a tripod socket.  Voigtländer are historically a big name in photography, but I don’t know how much they had to do with these cameras, which were made in Singapore between 1976 and 1978.

The camera I had seemed to have some issues with wind-on, namely that it would only do it when set to the sunny setting.  It’s a nice camera that’s easy to carry around, but the small size also makes is hard to hold it still.

Not bad for a small-format, simple camera.  The film was way out of date and had an obvious pink tinge I had to correct.  110 format cameras were often given away as novelty items or kid’s toys and the big name on this one doesn’t elevate it much beyond that.

That’s not to say that Lanthar lens counts for nothing.  This little camera had a lot of work to do with me putting film that expired in 1990 in it.  It did ok – lack of detail I would expect, but  pretty much every picture was too dark.