Vivitar IC 101 Panorama
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| Vivitar IC 101 image by Boxy Brown's Bling (Image rights) |
Among the many plastic Chinese "focus free" 35mm cameras sold by Vivitar, the IC 101 is unusual in being permanently fixed in a panoramic image format. No exposure or focus adjustments are possible, and there is no flash hot shoe, so this is strictly an outdoor, daylight camera.
As with other cheap 35mm panoramic cameras (such as the Ansco Pix Panorama, the putative "panoramic" image is not achieved by exposing a wider image than the standard 24×36 mm frame. Instead, the film gate is permanently masked to an image size of 13×36 mm—wasting much of the film area. Photofinishers are expected to enlarge this cropped image into wider-than-standard prints.
In all likelihood, the lens of the IC 101 is identical to the one in its siblings the IC 100 or IC 400. While the mask in the film gate if the IC 101 is permanently affixed, it is possible to carve away the plastic and approximate the conventional 3:2 image proportions. The resulting rough frame edges may suit a photographer who works with "lo-fi" imagery.
Links
- IC 101 modified to remove mask and sample resulting image from slimmer_jimmer (James Butler) on Flickr.
