I don’t know if they’re new this year or just newly popular, but I noticed Quad Cameras in several of the stores I visited during the holiday season. Basically they’re a cheap ($12 or less) camera with four lenses. When you snap a picture, it takes four shots in quick succession and prints them on one 35mm film frame.
The result is a photo divided into four sections, with the time-lapse photos spread out from top to bottom, left to right. (I’d link to a site for illustrative purposes, but most of them are catalog pages and I don’t want to seem to endorse one.)
Has anyone tried this camera at home? I’ll probably drop $12 on one eventually, but I’m wondering if it’s as entertaining as the catalog copy tries to make it sound. I can see where you’d get some amusing photos of your cat or your baby, but further use seems limited.
This has got to be one of the more bizarre varient of “quality photo gear by the checkstand”!
What if you happen to like one of the frames? I can see taking such a negative to a pro color shop for custom enlarging - hell, they might do it for free, just for the opportunity to snigger at you.
If you want to take pictures, take pictures. If you want a useless toy, well, it’s cheap enough.
Well, I never thought they’d be quality photographic instruments.
I saw one again tonight while I was shopping, and I’m less tempted to get one. The photo order seems wonky to me – instead of:
1 2
3 4
they go
1 4
2 3
Somehow that inelegance dampens whatever charm I thought they might have.
Yeah, I got one free when I registered with some website. I’ve only used one roll of film, and out of that only got about three
cool-looking sequences.
The time-lapse between the lenses is pretty tiny, so if the thing you’re photographing isn’t moving quickly, you really don’t get much impression of movement.
And I agree that the sequence seems kinda wrong.
But, you know, $12 is only £7.44 in real money, not bad for a new toy.
Looking at the sequence, I’m guessing that the shutter rotates counterclockwise.
They best thought of as disposable novelty items. They’ll only last about 4 rolls of film at best. But $12 it’s hardly an Enron
I’ve always seen them marketed specifically as golf/baseball swing analysis tools. That’s about the only use I can think of for them.
There are three quality problems with putting four pictures on a 35mm frame for $12:
-
Any camera that costs $12 is going to take about the worst picture possible.
-
Reducing the 35mm frame by a factor of four will make that bad picture much worse.
-
Due to the way photos are cropped by automatic printers, etc., it’s highly likely that the image as printed will not cover the same field of view: e.g., photos on the left will be missing their left edges, those on the right their right edges.
There are quite a few 35mm cameras that can shoot pictures every couple seconds. They have high quality, and allow more flexability. Including such things as being able to shoot a whole roll at one time. Useful for fashion photography, sports, etc.
And here I thought he was talking about 2" Quad Videotape. D’oh!