Magimatic

As long as we're talking about childhood photography, I thought I'd post this picture of my first camera -- a Magimatic X50 that I got for Christmas in 1974. I'm not sure who took this picture or why. It may have been me, using either my dad's or my brother's camera, and I do remember that it's from a trip we took to the beach. It's my only record of the old Magimatic, which I stopped using in the early '80s and later gave to Goodwill.

This camera took 126 cartridge film, and I have long believed it was manufactured by Kodak. But when I got to reading about it online yesterday, I learned that it was actually made by the Imperial Camera Company of Chicago, Ill. Apparently it was a competitor of the Kodak Instamatic. A blogger named Jim Grey wrote an interesting reminiscence about his own Magimatic several years ago, and mentioned that they cost about ten bucks new, which seems believable. It was almost entirely plastic and was never meant for high-quality pictures. Here's what it looked like still in the box.

I laughed when I read Jim's lament that his Magimatic pictures were so blurry. "The X50’s shutter button is super stiff and hard to fire, leading to camera shake that obscured the details of my recorded childhood memories," he wrote, and YES, I had the same problem! So many of my old photos are blurry. For example, here's my dog Herman, in November 1979:

(I may also have been running after her to get the picture -- Herman used to cower if I ever raised the camera and would either scurry away or roll over on her back in a submissive pose.) As I recall, the button got harder and harder to push as the camera aged. By the time I got to high school it was barely functional.

This is what most of my pictures look like from that era. But what can one expect from a $10 camera?

I believe the Magimatic was so named because it took a Magicube, a flash cube that required no batteries. Flash pictures generally worked better, perhaps because that brief moment of illumination helped conceal any camera shake. Unfortunately I have very few flash photos, because getting a flash cube meant going to the drug store and spending money, God forbid.

Here's one that I've blogged before, of my dad. It's one of my first pictures -- you can see the Magimatic camera box sitting on the table in front of him.

Apparently some camera buffs still use Magimatics, even though the cartridge film is no longer commercially manufactured. Here's a whole video on how to load an old cartridge with modern 35mm film and wind it through the camera. Why anyone would want to do that I'm not sure, but whatever floats your boat, as they say.

Anyway, I had some fun reading and reminiscing about this camera yesterday. And as long as we're wandering down a nostalgic path, how do you like my new t-shirt?

This is a replica of the t-shirts sold at the first concert I ever attended. I had an original but of course it eventually fell apart, decades ago. I was looking around online to remind myself what the shirt looked like, and I found someone online selling them new. It just arrived yesterday. Score!