When going away on holiday most people still tend to choose disposable cameras, and concequently we do get a lot of people coming in and having their cameras processed in the Photo Lab. I can only assume that people don’t like to take their expensive cameras with them on holiday if they are going to be going out every night and don’t want to take the risk of anything going wrong, such as having the camera damaged or stolen and loosing an £100+ piece of equipment as well as all their photos, with a disposable camera it is cheap to replace and not a big deal if it goes missing plus disposables can give you a bit of excitement whilst waiting for the film to be processed to see what came out.
One of the main problems we get with disposable cameras are people buying very cheap cameras and the photos not coming out as well as they could have done if the customers would have bought a more expensive one. A lot of disposable cameras nowadays are recycled, we operate such a scheme where I work where we send off the camera bodies once the films have been removed and they get repaired and restocked with film before ending up on the shelves again.
The only downside to this is that to keep the costs down, quite often the films used in the recycled cameras are the cheapest things the manufacturer can get hold of and not of any recognised brand. The most common films found inside the disposable cameras seem to be named after countries, specifically “Italian” and “German” films seem quite popular with the recyclers.
These films are not of a good quality usually and quite often clearly contain rejects from other companies such as Kodak or Fuji, and more often than not are contained within a recycled canister which will have the original manufacturers details covered up by a sticker. To really emphasise how cheap these cameras can be, once I even saw a film canister which had half a film still inside it, with another half a film stuck to the original with tape, all in the name of saving a bit of money.
Sometimes however, depending on how cheap the recyclers are, they do put into the cameras the cheapest films they can find, the 12 exposure films. These films are more often than not clearly rejects from the companies who make the “German” and “Italian” films, with dents, holes and tears in the films and rips in the perforations which allow the film to be pulled through the camera.
These films are usually also a pain to process in the lab as they are inside a standard 35mm cassette and normally our “film pickers” (a tool used to extract the tongue of a film from the cassette) are unable to retrieve the tongue and we have to “crack” the film, or in other words break open the cassette in a dark room and place it inside a dark box used for test strips before processing it.
Now based on what I see, your average customers’ 24 exposure disposable camera that they take away on holiday will usually have 10-15 photos that come out as intended. If you scale this down to the 12 exposure disposable cameras you are paying 4 to 5 pounds for 5 or 6 photos, which works out being very expensive.
However the next thing the recyclers do is to seal the cameras back up again, by using what feels like miles and miles of black electrical tape as opposed to the proper base caps for the cameras. Now this isn’t always 100% light proof unlike the base caps and sometimes light does have a tendency to leak in, causing red marks or streaks to appear on the prints when they are printed. Which needless to say customers do not appreciate whatsoever.
One way of spotting these recycled disposable cameras is the price tag, usually they will be offered as a cheaper alternative to the standard Kodak/Fuji disposable cameras, and to cover up all the black electrical tape used in the recycling process the cameras are wrapped in a cardboard sleeve usually with bright colours to appeal to kids.
One of the other problems we seem to get with disposable cameras is that people don’t tend to use the flash, this is a major problem, but I will cover this in a later post. Suffice to say for the moment it is a good idea to use a flash indoors, even if you think the lighting is fine, as long as the subject is a good few meters in front of you to prevent them from being over exposed and just white in the photos.
The only other type of disposable camera we get are the underwater disposables sold by many shops, when people take them abroad with them, they are expecting to be able to go off and take stunning photos and are quite disappointed when they get their prints back and are unable to tell whether that grey mass is the seabed, the coral reef, or simply someone else’s back.
The main problem with the underwater cameras is that their shutter times are longer than conventional disposable cameras due to the lower levels of light found underwater and so most of the photos people take do end up blurred to a degree. A lot of people do also seem to take their disposable cameras to darker depths of the sea and end up with either very dark photos or no photos at all.
In conclusion:
– Stick to recognisable brands of disposable cameras, such as Kodak, Fuji and even supermarket own brand cameras are of a good quality.
– Avoid any cardboard covered cameras.
– Check the number of exposures on the film within a camera before purchasing and avoid anything with less than 24 exposures in total.
– Try to use the flash whenever possible in poor lighting conditions.
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Those cheap disposable cameras are a real pain. It’s got to the point now where I don’t even bother trying to get those 12 exposure films out in the ‘proper’ way, they just go straight into the bag.