The Kodak Pony 828 was one prestige step above the Brownie, the Chevrolet of Kodaks.
Murilee MartinAs I’m shopping for weird old car parts (lately I’ve been trying to find 3R ignition components for my “Kustom Korona” lowrider Toyota), I’m also trying to find long-obsolete film cameras to take on my junkyard travels. So many similarities between silly old car stuff and silly old camera stuff! The latest addition to my photographic hoard collection is a 1949-vintage Kodak Pony 828, which shoots a film format that went out of production in 1985.
Murilee Martin
828 film is paper-backed 35mm rollfilm, nearly identical to the stuff Kodak used in the 1910s for the tiny No. 00 Cartridge Premo box camera but with different spools. It differs from the 135 film that we think of as “35mm film” today in that it is unperforated (or has a single perforation per frame as an indexing feature for cameras that require it). In the photo above, the roll of film on the left is modern cartridge-based 135; the roll on the right is 828.
Murilee Martin
To get some spools and backing paper, I went to eBay and bought a few rolls of 1970s-vintage Kodachrome. There’s about a zero-percent chance that 50-years-expired Kodachrome would be usable now (even if I could get it developed), so I pulled out that film and replaced it with some unperforated 35mm film I bought for my No. 00 Cartridge Premo. That whole process is very tedious and finicky and must be done in total darkness, so it’s the same level of hassle we put up with when messing around with ancient automotive technology.
Murilee Martin
Just as the advantage of a Holley versus a Quadrajet is mostly—but not entirely—illusory, so is the advantage of using 828 film over perforated 35mm film. As you can see in a comparison of two negative strips of 35mm width, the unperforated 828 film (at bottom in the photo above) has a somewhat larger image.
Murilee Martin
So, I headed over to my favorite Denver-area car graveyard with a fresh eight-exposure roll of film in my Pony 828. The photographs came out well, as you can see from this shot of the interior of a 1981 Cadillac Sedan de Ville d’Elegance.
Murilee Martin
Just as General Motors under Alfred Sloan had the “Ladder of Success” system during the postwar era, in which your first GM car would be a Chevy and you’d work your way up through Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and finally Cadillac as you became more successful, so did Kodak—really, the General Motors of the American photography industry for about a century—have the same kind of prestige system when the Pony 828 was new. At the very bottom was the lowly Brownie line, with very affordable yet fully functional box cameras. The Kodak Brownie was the Chevrolet of cameras in 1949 America (while its Ansco counterparts were the Plymouths).
Murilee Martin
The Kodak Pony line was a step up from the Brownies, which would have positioned it about where Pontiac lived at the time. The 828 was at the lower end of the Pony range, making it akin to the 1949 Pontiac Streamliner Six De Luxe two-door sedan.
Murilee Martin
The Streamliner De Luxe was a bit nicer and more powerful than its Chevrolet Styleline De Luxe sibling, and so the Kodak Pony had a few more aperture and shutter-speed adjustments than the Brownie.
Murilee Martin
If you wanted to move up from the Kodak equivalent of a Pontiac to the Kodak equivalent of an Oldsmobile, well, then you needed to buy a new Signet.
Murilee Martin
When focusing with the Pony 828, you have to estimate the distance of your subject and find that number of feet on the focus ring. The Argus C3 “Brick” camera—maybe more of the Studebaker of late-1940s American cameras—had a futuristic rangefinder built in.
Murilee Martin
You’ll find one in every Chrysler Sebring convertible. You’ll see.
Murilee Martin
Where will the Pony go next? Perhaps the race track!
Keyword: 1949 Pontiac Streamliner Six of Cameras Visits the Junkyard