INTRODUCTION

The Kodak Tele-Disc is a compact camera made in USA by Kodak between 1985 and 1990.

BEST SUITED FOR:

Lomography

PERSONAL NOTES

Since its beginning, Kodak's slogan was "You press the button, we do the rest!". Kodak had one thing in mind : make photography available to the masses, to make photography simpler.

This is why we saw things like 126 and 110 film cartridges, and Disc film. These cartridges were much simpler to load and use.

The Kodak Tele-Disc is part of that heritage, one that makes photography simple. The Disc film is very easy to load, just open the camera, drop in the disc, and close the camera, voilà!

The Tele-Disc has 2 lenses, hence the name. Exposure and focus are automatic, like other instamatic, just point and shoot. The Tele-Disc also has a built-in electronic flash, so no more of these costly and less reliable flashbulbs!

The processing was easy back in the days when labs were able to take these in their machines. But today, no one knows is willing to process them.

When I used the Tele-Disc, I was already processing black and white film a lot, but I never processed color before. So there was my chance. I bought the C-41 Unicolor powder kit from Freestyle Photo, and had a lot of fun with Color processing. To my surprise, it's more easy than many told me. Of course, you need controlled temperature for your chemestry, especially the color developper, as the bleach, fix and stabilizer have more tolerance to temperature change.

One cool thing I found is that the diameter of the hole of the disc film fits perfectly onto the center column of a Paterson developping tank. So I was able to process these Disc films in daylight, much easier, because I could look at timers and thermometers.

The result: the size of the image is quite small, 8x11mm, so no big enlargement here. As you can imagine, the quality is not that great.

I personally think that the processed disc itself is nicer than all the images on it.

CONCLUSION

I used a Kodak Tele-Disc within my film formats exploration. It took a lot of ressources to experiment with the Disc film. Anything that uses Disc film now is pretty worthless, do not pay anything for something that uses Disc film.

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