C41
Kodak Portra 400
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
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The Olympus Standard is a folding medium-format camera introduced around 1936 by Takachiho Optical Industries — the Tokyo-based manufacturer that would later rename itself Olympus. It shoots the "semi" 4.5x6 cm format on 120 film, yielding 16 frames per roll, and is equipped with a fixed lens descended from the early Zuiko optical formula, mounted in a simple leaf shutter. The Standard is a scale-focus camera with no rangefinder coupling; focus is set by estimating distance and reading the lens barrel scale. It predates the Olympus Six by roughly three years and represents the company's earliest foray into medium-format rollfilm cameras. Surviving examples are rare and are of primary interest to collectors of Japanese prewar photographic equipment.
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Recommended film stocks for the — format your camera takes.
C41
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
View profile →C41
Kodak Portra 160 is a professional C-41 color negative film with fine grain, soft contrast, and natural color.
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Kodak Ektar 100 is a fine-grain C-41 color negative film with saturated color and high sharpness.
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About this camera
Takachiho's founding medium-format folder: prewar semi-format 4.5x6 on 120 with a Zuiko ancestor lens.
| Field | Value |
|---|
| Format | 120, 4.5x6 cm (16 frames) |
| Mount | Fixed lens |
| Years | ~1936–~1938 |
| Lens | ~75mm f/3.5 or f/4.5 Zuiko-type |
| Shutter | 1s – 1/100s + B, Seikosha or Koho leaf |
| Flash sync | None (prewar, no sync provisions) |
| Meter | None |
| Modes | Manual |
| Weight | ~550 g |
| Battery | None |
Takachiho Optical Industries was founded in 1919 and initially produced microscopes and other optical instruments. By the mid-1930s the company entered the consumer camera market, with the Olympus Standard among the earliest results. The 4.5x6 "semi" format was a common choice for Japanese manufacturers of the period — it offered economy in film usage versus full 6x6 or 6x9 while retaining the negative quality advantages of 120 rollfilm over 35mm.
The Standard was succeeded by the Olympus Six around 1939, which moved to the full 6x6 frame and incorporated design refinements informed by European folding-camera conventions. The Standard's production run was brief — perhaps two years — and it was never exported in meaningful quantities. Documentation of variants is sparse; some sources refer to the model as "Semi-Olympus I" to distinguish it from subsequent semi-format designs.
The Olympus Standard is the earliest identifiable Olympus-branded medium-format camera, making it a key artifact in the history of one of the twentieth century's most significant camera manufacturers. It demonstrates Takachiho's 1930s strategy: adopt the self-erecting folding design pioneered by European makers (especially Voigtlander and Zeiss Ikon), fit it with domestically manufactured Zuiko-type optics, and sell it into the growing Japanese amateur photography market at a price point below imported equivalents.
For historians of Japanese photographic technology, the Standard documents the pre-Olympus product line alongside near-contemporaries like the Konishiroku Pearlette and Minolta Vest series. It is not a camera with a significant artistic legacy — its use as a shooting instrument today is essentially nil — but as an artifact it fills an important gap in understanding how the Olympus optical lineage began.
BW
Kodak Tri-X 400 is a classic black-and-white film known for strong tonality, visible grain, and documentary character.
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