![]() What is known, however, is that (to me) the AiBORG has to be the most poorly designed camera of the 1990s. Only a handful of people know for sure if the name “AiBORG” was the result of a night of heavy drinking at a back street Tokyo Izakaya or if the marketing team were just fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The most poorly designed film camera of the 1990s: Konica AiBORG The Konica AiBORG. If you’re interested in learning more about this curious technological folly, head on over to my extensive CONTAX AX review. Bodies in excellent condition regularly sell for US$200 and mint examples can be had for sub-US$500. The AX still be had for a song and it’s well, well worth it. The Contax sold but not exceptionally well, as evidenced by the number of utterly amazing examples now on the secondhand market. Nikon and Canon were already beating its AF performance with their previous-gen cameras and it was introduced to the market at over $800 more (in today’s money) than the objectively superior Nikon F5, which was released in the same year. The camera was an also-ran in the autofocus SLR race. ![]() If it’s so good, why give it the “obscure” spot? The net result is a chubby, heavy but surprisingly useable 35mm film SLR. The trick? A moving film plane, or as Contax’s designers put it, a “camera inside a camera”. Produced from 1996 until ~2005 when the Contax brand was officially shuttered, the Contax AX has a unique trick up its sleeve: it turns any manual focus lens that can be attached or adapted to its Contax/Yashica (C/Y) mount into an autofocus lens. The CONTAX AX is probably the most unnecessarily innovative film camera of the 1990s and traces its chequered lineage back to the early a prototype camera shown at 1980’s Photokina. The 1990s most obscure film camera: CONTAX AX The Contax AX In short, welcome to my love letter to 1990s film cameras. It’s not a countdown in the traditional sense and quite a bit more than the “listicle” the headline above might lead you to believe you were about to read. What follows is my take on the 10 “best” film cameras released during the 1990s. What intrigues me the most is how that simple-ish challenge of running a strip of film through a camera has been addressed in so many different ways. ![]() On a smaller scale, film cameras through the ages provide us with insights into how the minds of designers and artists clustered in different parts of the world interpreted solutions to the challenges of universal interface and ergonomics – it’s fascinating. These cameras are mirrors to the fashions, cultures, thinking and attitudes prevalent at the time of their creation, from the Art Deco Rolleicords of the 1930s to the utilitarian simplicity of 1970s Canon and Nikon SLRs all the way to the insanity that produced 1996’s Polaroid PDC-2000/40 you see above. The best (and worst) film cameras of the 1990s - EMULSIVE Close Search for:įilm cameras provide us with a living history which we can use to trace the development of design, aesthetics, technology, engineering and manufacturing capability across more than 150 years.
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