135 film

He manufactured it, won the gold medal in the Concours Lépine, and in 1910 sold at a small scale and without much success.

Although Barnack designed his prototype camera around 1913, the first experimental production run of ur-Leicas (Serial No.

The original Leica prototype holds the record as being the world's most expensive camera,[8] selling for €2.16 million in 2012.

Kodak also introduced a line of American made cameras that were simpler and more economical than the Retina.

The designations 235 and 435 refer to 35 mm film in daylight-loading spools, that could be loaded into Contax or Leica style reusable cassettes, respectively,[9] without need of a darkroom.

After the war, Exakta resumed development and the Contax S model with the now familiar pentaprism viewing feature was introduced in 1949.

Asahi's Pentax introduced the instant-return mirror, important for the popularity of SLRs; until then, the viewfinder on an SLR camera blanked as the mirror sprang out of the optical path just before taking the picture, returning when the film was wound on.

Numerous other film formats waxed and waned in popularity, but by the 1970s, interchangeable-lens SLR cameras and smaller rangefinders, from expensive Leicas to "point-and-shoot" pocket cameras, were all using 35 mm film, and manufacturers had proliferated.

The DX film-speed encoding system was introduced in the 1980s, as were single-use cameras pre-loaded with 35 mm film and using plastic lenses of reasonable enough quality to produce acceptable snapshots.

Automated all-in-one processing and printing machines made 35 mm developing easier and less expensive, so that quality colour prints became available not only from photographic specialty stores, but also from supermarkets, drugstores, and big box retailers, often in less than an hour.

In 1996, a smaller format called Advanced Photo System (APS) was introduced by a consortium of photographic companies in an attempt to supersede 135 film.

Within five years of its launch, cheap digital compact cameras started becoming widely available, and APS sales plummeted.

While they have shifted the vast majority of their product lines to digital, major camera manufacturers such as Canon and Nikon continued to make expensive professional-grade 35 mm film SLRs until relatively recently (such as the Canon EOS-1V (discontinued in 2018) and the Nikon F6 (discontinued in 2020).

In a 2021 PetaPixel survey, 75% of respondents expressed interest in newly manufactured analog cameras.

[12] In 2024, the Pentax 17 and the Aflie TYCH+ 35 mm cameras were released, both using the half-frame format to conserve film.

[17] Individual rolls of 135 film are enclosed in single-spool, light-tight, metal cassettes to allow cameras to be loaded in daylight.

Since 1983, most film cassettes have been marked with a DX encoding six-digit barcode pattern, which uses a DX number to identify the manufacturer and film type (and thus processing method), and the number of exposures, for the use of photofinishing laboratories.

The cassettes are also manufactured with a Camera Auto Sensing code constructed as two rows of six rectangular areas on the metal cassette surface which are either conductive or insulating, representing 32 possible film speeds, eight possible film lengths, and four possible values of exposure tolerance or latitude.

Conforming cameras detect at least some of these areas; only three contacts are needed to set a light meter for the four most popular film speeds.

Film designed to be sensitive to infrared radiation can be obtained, both monochrome and with false-colour (or pseudocolour) rendition.

In 1967, the Soviet KMZ factory introduced a 24×58 mm panoramic format with its Horizont camera (descendants of which are called, in the Roman alphabet, Horizon).

There have been some 6-, 8-, 10-, and 15-exposure rolls given away as samples, sometimes in disposable cameras, or used by insurance adjusters to document damage claims.

The Ilford HP black-and-white film, on a thin polyester base, allowed 72 exposures in a single cassette.

Most consumer DSLR cameras use smaller sensors, with the most popular size being APS-C which measures around 23×15 mm (giving it a crop factor of 1.5–1.6).

For an authentic homage, one can apply creative digital filters like the ones commonly used in Instagram that map the colour profile to a characteristic look.

Different brands of 35mm film would achieve the creative colour profile through a chemical process.

For example Fuji Velvia film gave the photo a characteristic of saturated colours under daylight, high contrast, and exceptional sharpness.

With many smaller formats now common (such as APS-C), lenses are often advertised or marked with their "35 mm equivalent" or "full-frame equivalent" focal length as a mnemonic, due to the historic prevalence of the 35 mm format.