I received my invitation to take part in this year’s Emulsive Secret Santa last week. I was wondering if it would still be going ahead as Emulsive.org, the site from whence it originally sprang now seems to be defunct, having not been updated for quite some time.

So I was glad to get an email inviting me to this year’s gift exchange although, due to the current tariff situation in the US, the swap has been split into US and rest of the world sections this time around. Registration closes tomorrow, after which people will be provided with the details of their recipients and the task of finding a suitable gift begun (timescales are quite tight this time, so it’s likely that some folks will be receiving a late Christmas gift, but that’s not so bad – January can be quite glum, so a nice present arriving in the mail will cheer things up somewhat).

I was very fortunate last year to receive not only a bunch of 35mm film a lovely notebook, and other goodies, but also a Kodak H35N half-frame camera, and it was with this that I shot the pictures in today’s post (although I already posted a few others about six weeks ago).

The camera itself (branded Kodak, but actually made by RETO) is a relatively simple affair with a 2 element 22mm f/8 coated lens (part glass, part acrylic), a 1/100sec shutter speed, a built-in flash, and a built-in star filter. For it’s basic spec, the camera produces reasonable pictures if you don’t mind noticeable softness at the narrow ends of the frame. I didn’t feel any need to scan them at high resolution because the detail simply isn’t there, but at smaller size they look nice and, as is the case with any camera, it’s what you do with it that counts.

The camera design has a clear lineage to the old Kodak Instamatic models. It’s very lightweight and doesn’t feel like it will take much rough handling (but for the price, that is to be expected), but it works perfectly well in use and I didn’t have any sense that it would break – something my other RETO-made camera, an Ultrawide and Slim, does suffer from in regard to advancing the film. The film advance on the H35N was fine, as was the film rewind crank, which is located on the base of the camera along with a plastic tripod socket.

The top of the camera features the shutter button, frame counter and, because there is a bulb-mode, a cable release socket, which is nice to have and opens the camera up to additional creative possibilities. Apart from bulb, because of the otherwise fixed shutter speed and aperture settings, there is no ISO setting control, and certainly no DX-coding mechanism is required.

I didn’t have a need to use the flash at any point (and didn’t have a battery in the camera anyway – the battery is only needed for the flash), and the star filter feels somewhat gimmicky and not something I would want to use anyway. So I didn’t.

Although I like the pictures I got when using the H35N, I can’t help thinking that I would probably have liked them more if I’d taken them with a different camera – even if it would have meant using twice as much film. However, despite these reservations, I still had fun using the camera, got pictures I like, and it’s made me think about maybe getting a better specced half-frame camera somewhere down the line – maybe an older model like an Olympus PEN, or perhaps a Pentax 17 if I can find one for a decent price.

I’ll post some more pictures from the H35N tomorrow – half-frame gives you a LOT of photos!

Kodak H35N & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 25 January 2025