Kodak Instamatic Camera & Smartphone Camera Affects On Photography!

Updated: Jan 26, 2022

The affect of Kodak’s Instamatic Camera on Photography

Back in 1963, Kodak released the Instamatic camera. This camera offered two shutter speeds (one with flash, one without), an f/11 single element lens, and shot a square 24mm x 24mm photo. Consumer photography had been a growing hobby through the 1950s and 1960s, but it was still quite specialized.

Kodak made a terrible Instamatic camera. It actually depended on the latitude of Kodacolor film and print processing to deliver a more or less okay shot in bright sunlight, having no metering. It could focus out to about 3ft or so, no closeups. These cameras sold for $15.95. Since Kodak put more cameras in people’s hands, they also sold more film around the world, giving them a one two punch in the photography industry. Kodak had extraordinarily successful! between 1963 and 1970, selling 50 million cameras.

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Did the Instamatic ruin photography? Of course not! It got people “snapshooting” who would never have picked up a camera. just as Kodak’s Brownie series did in from 1900s through 1967. Kodak put more cameras in more hands than any other company worldwide, and in North America we became a culture of casual photographers.

However, the success of the Instamatic ultimately proved its downfall. Kodak worked hard to make cameras even smaller, even better suited for casual amateur photography, first with the 110 Instamatic, then the Disc camera. These eventually lost out to 35mm compact cameras, which had better lenses, automatic exposure, and eventually automatic focus, etc. More people got into photography; this time not overly dominated by any single company. With the advent of microprocessors, even SLRs could be consumer products. Canon launched the AE-1 into that market and sold 6 million cameras, exceptionally good for a system model.

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The Consumer Smartphone Revolution

Apple started the consumer smartphone revolution, and every still-successful smartphone on the market followed the golden-brick road to consumer phones. These early phones had the same really bad digital cameras as the business phones. Then around 2010–2011, smartphone manufacturers started to realize that consumers wanted a real camera — ‘the Instamatic of the 21st Century’.

And so, we got the consumer smartphone camera we know today. This didn’t make cameras makers happy. One of the benefits that camera markers in the 1960s and up until the 1990s had was that consumer cameras were pretty terrible. This helped to create enthusiasts who wanted a better camera. Once the smartphones manufacturers got serious, they could complete with low-end point and shoot cameras.

Once the smartphones got serious, they completed with low-end Point & Shoot cameras. The Point & Shoot market always had to have at least a short zoom lens; the phone could not fit one. Curiously, that meant that entry-level Point & Shoot digital market started to fail against smartphones, with their single-focal-length (prime) lens. Sure, the Point & Shoot market was better if you needed more range, but for everyday photos, the Instamatics had proven that one slightly wide lens is good enough for many casual users.

And the smartphones camera just kept getting better. Your phone doesn’t just snap the photo, it finishes the photo, the thing serious photographers do with their raw files in programs like Lightroom. The phone can’t be creative, but it can use expert systems or even modern AI to take a photo that most people will like. And then the phone has the ability to upload the photos, to sites like Facebook, Twitter & Instagram. So, it’s actually doing things that serious digital cameras don’t generally do in-camera.

Are Smartphones Good For Photography?

The effect has been profound. Fewer cameras are sold every year, while only recently the rate of 1.5+ billion phones a year had slowed just a little. However, this can’t be blamed entirely on the smartphone. If you look back to the late 1960s, there was kind of a settled market in serious cameras. There wasn’t much of a big technological jump until widespread auto-exposure in the 1980s and autofocus in the 1990s, and finally digital.

When the digital photography revolution started, like those early smartphone cameras, they were convenient, but pretty bad. Camera markers are working on things to enhance their existing product lines: more pixels, computational photography, AI, etc. In 2021, the ‘Mirrorless Camera’ has taken over the mid to high end digital camera market. The smartphone camera disrupted the low-end Point & Shoot digital market starting around 2014.

There are fewer Point & Shoot market models, but lots of forced evolution. Overall, everyone’s getting better photos. So, is that good? For the consumer, no question! The smartphone camera attempts to be your everything: shooting, editing, posting online. You’re not supposed to care about how it all works.