Multipose Portable Cameras
Multipose Portable Cameras Limited was a camera maker in about 1930. The company is known for only one camera, the Maton. The company appears to have been based in London,[1] though the designer was Anatol Josepho of New York, and the camera is marked in French and has a French lens.
The body is made from brown bakelite. It is broadly upright and rectangular in shape, with a moulded grip at the back (which rather resembles a knuckle-duster). There is a small crank on the right hand side, which operates both the film feed and the shutter. The camera works rather like a hand-cranked cine camera; the patent describes a mechanism with cammed feed wheels such that, while the film uptake is continuous, driven by the crank, the section of film in the 'gate' is held stationary while the shutter opens to expose it.
The camera makes pictures 24x30 mm on paper-backed roll film. According to the patent, this is loaded in a pair of box-shaped cassettes (one for the supply side, one at the uptake side), and the diagrams show a pair of square spaces to accommodate these. However, an example sold at Westlicht has a square hole on the uptake end (at the back), but a round one on the supply end (perhaps the design was altered to make it easier to see how to load the film).[2] The auction listing at Westlicht states that the camera took 24 exposures per load; however, the camera has frame-counter windows on the top, showing both the number of frames exposed and the number remaining, and in the diagrams in the patent, these add to 36 frames.[1] The film was supplied with the film already threaded between the pair of cassettes.[1] An example of the camera was sold by the German auctioneer Rahn AG, with two casettes.[3]
The lens is an 85 mm f/4.5 Roussel Trylor, rather long for the format. It has front-element focusing to two metres. The shutter is a Gitzo with speeds 1/25 - 1/100 plus 'B'. For the instantaneous speeds, the shutter opens when the crank handle passes its lowest point; for 'B' ('Pose') it opens at that position, and the closing position is also marked. The aperture is set on the shutter body (down to f/32).
At the top of the camera, there is a brilliant finder, with two eyepieces; the mirror can be rotated for use with the camera vertically or horizontally oriented.
There is a tripod bush set in the left side of the body, which also has the removalbe film-chamber cover for loading.
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 US Patent 1,830,168 Photographic Camera, filed 1928 and granted 1931 to Anatol M Josepho of New York and Multipose Portable Cameras Ltd, of London, and describing the Maton; at Espacenet, the patent search facility of the European Patent Office.
- ↑ Maton sold at the May 2011 Westlicht Photographica Auction in Vienna.
- ↑ Maton sold with leather case and two film cassettes in May 2012 (Rahn's Photographica Auction 16) by Rahn AG in Frankfurt.
