In reference to this article:Do photocopy machines emit radiation?
Having been born about 5 months before this article was written, I have to ask, what the heck is a Brownie (in this context) and why is it emitting light? My brownies always come out kind of on the dark side. Maybe I’m setting the oven to the wrong temperature or something…
It’s an old fashioned camera.
Quite a cool little old camera at that -
You can still buy them used at places like ebay and whatnot, and
they’re quite interesting. (They’re also a little more difficult to use than your standard SLR.)
I actually just picked one up the other day to mess around with (I’m a professional photographer, and love messing with old gear)
and they’re pretty neat. Like a TLR without all those nasty things like f-stops and shutter speed controls … 
They shoot a type of roll film called 620, which is similar to medium format 120 film but a bit narrower.
BTW, anybody that has photo questions, please feel free to ask, I’ll do what I can to help you out.
Man, you really can get information on just about anything on this message board. Thanks, y’all!
“I have to ask, what the heck is a Brownie (in this context) and why is it emitting light?”
It’s not emitting light, it’s reacting to light; the drum in a photocopy machine undergoes a chemical reaction when exposed to light, as does the film in a camera.
I had to read that sentence from the article several times before I got it. “What? Brownies undergo a photographic process? Is he referring to the cooking process?? Is he referring to “special” brownies? :looks at date: Ohhhh”
The first Brownies, I’m told, came ready-loaded with film, and you mailed the whole camera back to Kodak for processing. They sent you back the photo and your camera, reloaded. When I was a kid in the mid-50’s, my Brownie was owner-reloadable. We’d take the film to a local shop for processing. The camera was made of injection molded Bakelite plastic, but it was still wind-it-yourself and fixed focus point-and-shoot.
Oops. That should have been, "They sent you back the photos…
The first Kodak (1888) was loaded (with 100 shots) and returned for processing. The “Brownie” line began in 1900, and lasted until 1970. (By that time, Kodak had pretty much given up all pretensions to be a manufacturer of serious camera equipment; so that there was no longer any point in using the name “Brownie” to distinguish their cheap line; all Kodaks were cheap.) Not all Brownies were 620; some were 120 or 127, and the early models were all over the place.
The main thing the one hundred twenty-five Brownie models all had in common was that they were marketed to children. In fact, in 1930, Kodak gave away the special 50th-anniversary Brownie to any child who was 12 years old that year. The name was also used in the 50’s for an 8mm movie line.
a case of reverse confusion:
I bought an Epson 1600 to scan my 120 film. Usually 6cm wide film, such as 120, is called medium format. (It’s between 35mm and 8x10.)
I was puzzled how to run the thing because what I called medium format, they called ‘brownie format.’
