Instamatic-304 & its Lens

This Instamatic Camera has been sitting in my junk box rather long time = Because  1) I’m not very keen to disassemble Instamatic as I had hard time to deal with very awkward mechanism (It seemed, Kodak designer was not very smart) on the previous experience.  2) I’ve got too many similar kind of fuzzy lenses already. —– The lens on this camera has no focus adjustment, still it was made long before the Japanese one-time use camera by which omuni-focus lens became common = could mean, either very interesting omuni-focus lens or mediocre lens which rely on the small F-aperture (— when people goes out, it will be a fine day and the camera’s EE control will give a smaller aperture with deep depth of field).—– But, I’m not going to use their EE control = I’ll need to have a focus adjustment. = may need to use a not very smooth focus helicoid recently got from Ebay. —– ?

Anyhow, I disassembled the camera.  Since the camera was using only few screws to build and many parts / panels were glued down = as I anticipated, it was a very awkward hard work. (I wouldn’t recommend you to do this.   😀  )

Then I remembered,”If I need a helicoid”, I got an empty helicoid of the Canon FD lens, of which I took the lens out. (Photo left) From that empty shell, I further removed the FD mount part and the front cosmetic part. (Photo middle)

And put the lens which I’ve taken from the Instamatic-304 camera (Kodar 41mm F8 Lens) into the Canon helicoid on Sony A7R  (Photo right)

The test images of this lens were like those —–

Then, I made a fatal mistake.  After final assembly, in order to clean the lens, ( — I thought, that the white smear on the lens was caused by the plastic putty) so, I used the alcohol to clean the lens though, as this old plastic lens was not made by the today’s optical plastic but by a primitive stirole kind of plastic = the alcohol destroy the lens surface = and the image became like those.

M m m, —– even to a man who fancy the fuzzy images, these were gone too far, not funny at all.

On top of the snowy weather and CH brake down, life is hard and complicated.   Not funny at all.   😀

.