Rollei A110
There is something about high quality 110 cameras that gets us every time we lay hands on one.
Wait a minute, "high quality 110 camera? Isn't that an oxymoron?"
Not at all. While the proliferation of the simple and cheap Kodak Pocket Instamatic cameras has helped the 110 format become associated with the idea of lower quality photography, in its heyday the 110 format saw some pretty amazing, well-designed and quite innovative cameras. Think the Pentax Auto 110, the Minolta 110 Zoom or the Canon 110ED. Right up there with those cameras is the Rollei A110.
Produced from 1974-1980, the A110 was the product of Heinz Waaske, a famed designer who worked helped created the Rollei 35 as well as the Minox 35. The Rollei A110 is a classic case of understated (and brilliant) design. The camera works via a push-pull action. Pulling opens the camera and uncovers the lens. A super sensitive shutter button atop the body fires and pushing the camera shut advances the film and resets the shutter. The A110 has a nifty combined shutter-aperture mechanism where two blades opened thus starting the exposure and forming the aperture. The camera's meter read light passing through the lens during exposure and a second set of shutter blades closed when exposure was complete. This allowed the Rollei A110 (which handles exposure purely in an automatic function) to adapt to light changing during exposure. It also worked with flash photography to help insure proper exposure.
Other than the deceptively simple exposure system, the Rollei A110 used a scale system for focusing. An orange slider under the lens adjusted focus, with a superimposed scale showing rough distances in the viewfinder of the camera. While not ideal for exact focusing, the system is both fast and intuitive to use. A small light inside the viewfinder would also light up to indicate when the camera's meter detected too low of light levels for flashless, handheld photography. To this end, the Rollei A110 could accept a flash attachment that plugged into the end of the camera and used standard flash cubes for additional illumination, or the A110 had a tripod socket if long exposures without flash were required. The stepless exposure system could purportedly time out shutter speeds from 4 seconds all the way up to 1/400th.
The Rollei A110 would later be succeeded by the E110 model.
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