Bell & Howell was most famous for its cine cameras, and this still camera adopted technology from the Electric Eye Autoset movie models. It’s an attractive little camera with a satin-finish die-cast aluminium body covered partly in black leather-grained plastic, measuring 11x9x7cm, weighing 600 grams and shooting twelve 4x4cm pictures on 127 film.
- Launched: 1958
- Price at launch: £23 16s (£23.80)
- Guide price now: £19 (recent eBay purchase)
The lens is surrounded by what appears to be a selenium meter cell that’s actually a piece of bevelled plastic purely for decoration. The real cell is inside the viewfinder, behind the eyepiece and with a gap in its centre that the photographer is unaware of looking though when holding the camera to the eye.
A small thumbwheel beside the viewfinder gives a choice of settings for medium and fast films. Then, with the shutter speed fixed, apertures are set automatically between the lens’s two elements. Light shining on the meter cell generates a current that is fed to a miniature voltmeter which rotates a gear linked to two overlapping slotted discs. Each slot is tapered from wide at one end to narrow at the other. Their movement coincides to produce an aperture through which the image is recorded on the film.
The usual result is a correctly exposed picture, but only when a small green flag appears in the viewfinder. If the flag shows red, light levels are too low to shoot and flash is recommended.
The camera was originally sold with its own dedicated flashgun which attaches to the side. Flipping up the name plate on the front of the body reveals a sliding control used to change the aperture according to subject distance when flash is used, or can also be used without flash as a crude form of manual exposure control.
All of this, however, came at a price when you consider the nearly £25 cost of the Electric Eye compared to a Brownie 127 which, in the same year, had a price tag of £1 4s 5d.
What’s good
- Solidly built
- Extra large viewfinder
- Easy to use
- Still working
What’s bad
- Fixed shutter speed
- No apertures indicated on the flash distance setting
