Silverbased

The irony has not escaped us that Silverbased.org, dedicated to traditional film-based photography, depends so heavily on a digital camera for its illustrations. Even more mock-worthy is that the specs on my early Canon Digital Elph would be found quite laughable today.

Li-ion battery, Canon digi, 1918 Ansco folder

While my Elph’s compact size is great, and it has withstood an impressive amount of abuse, I will soon be at the crossroads. Both of the lithium-ion battery packs I bought for this camera have reached the point where they barely hold a charge—maybe lasting a dozen photos before conking out.

As many users of cell phones, iPods, and laptops have discovered, lithium-ion batteries are our civilization’s little pact with Satan. They’re the chemistry cramming the greatest number of watt-hours into the smallest volume, so all kinds of consumer electronics use them. Yet every Li-ion battery has a finite calendar lifetime. No matter how well or poorly you treat them, eventually, they all degrade to uselessness.

Confusingly, all the rules we once had drilled into our heads about caring for NiCad or lead-acid rechargeables turn out to be wrong for lithium-ion cells.

Keeping Li-ion batteries on their charger, fully topped off, actually damages them and shortens their lifespan. Worse, leaving a fully-charged pack in a hot, sun-baked car can wreck it in no time flat. Manufacturers tend to remain silent about this little bug, despite it being a far-from-exotic scenario.

Anyway, it turns out the best regime for preserving Li-ion cells is storing them at half-charge in a cool place; then only topping off the charge right before use.

The certain death of all lithium-ion battery packs has troubling implications for digital models surviving to become “vintage” cameras.

Battery packs are generally a proprietary type, specific to one particular camera brand. As different digital models come and go, many battery formats have been introduced. Today, I can still buy a replacement Li-ion pack for my Elph, at the boggling cost of $45. It seems silly to spend that kind of money prolonging the life of a dinosaurish model.

And every other shopper must be be reaching the same conclusion I am—so eventually, there will be no market left for selling replacements. Then, one by one, all the remaining packs of that particular type in the world will wither and waste away.

And no matter how much you may adore some particular digital camera… without electricity, it’s a cold, dead doorstop.

A real enthusiast might be able to reverse-engineer some alternative power supply. Perhaps the future collector of proto-digital cameras will obsessively freeze a cache of the right lithium packs, just as we retro camera nuts currently stockpile film.

But for the great bulk of digital cameras, their fate seems sealed. Five, ten years after the last replacement battery becomes unobtainable, virtually every digital model is headed to the landfill.

Some might shrug that this is the price of progress. But as a lover of vintage camera gear, this throwaway Brave New World saddens me.

I have several 50-year-old film cameras still in regular use. I have shot rolls with my father’s 1937 Kodak Retina. Actually, I consider my 1980s Olympus OM-2N to be rather newfangled technology.

And consider the other camera shown at the top of today’s post: an Ansco Vest Pocket Speedex No. 3.

This camera dates to about 1918, give or take a couple of years. By the time I got it, the leather covering was a wreck, and the camera had endured a few modifications. The shutter is not original (hence my piece of white tape, re-calibrating the f/stop scale); and I doubt the Goerz Syntor lens is either.

The Syntor is from the correct era, however—as I was delighted to find in this great 1913 Goerz catalog posted online by Seth Broder.

Now, let’s take a moment to contemplate the world of 1918. Model-T Fords were lurching around the country’s rutted roads—the very start of the automobile revolution. Rickety biplanes were flying mail routes; but passenger flights were rare experiments. So were radio broadcasts. The “candlestick” dial telephone, allowing subscribers to connect their own calls, arrived in 1919.

Yet today this 80-year-old Ansco can still perform exactly the same job it was created for. The manufacturer is extinct, but that doesn’t matter to me. Since it uses 120 film, I can simply load it up and go take pictures. (Note that the term “Vest Pocket” is more often associated with 127 film, because of Kodak’s successful line of 127 cameras using the name.)

I must admit that the camera’s shutter timing deviates wildly from the marked speeds. Fortunately its bellows were free from cracks and pinholes, though they did shed some black flecks onto the film.

So, the results?

Far more than just yielding a few hazy image to prove a point, the 4-element Syntor really surprised me. The photos were crisp and detailed even wide open at /f6.8. The focusing scale still seemed to be spot-on. And the richness of those 2-1/4″x 3-1/4″ negatives was a delight.

The folded size of the camera truly is “Vest Pocket” portable, too—it’s plausible that I might really throw this museum-piece into my camera bag for serious use.

I’m not going to claim this ancient Ansco has the convenience of digital. But for longevity, I put my bets on film.