Last week a co-worker, Troy, sent me a note asking me if I’d be interested in shooting one of the old cameras he had sitting on his shelf, and sent me an image of a Trusite camera. I had never seen one before so of course I said “YES!” before doing any research on it.

Thinking that I’d learn all I needed to know about it by searching the interwebs, I set to work learning about it so that when I shot it there would be no surprises.

This is the part of the story where if this was a video, I’d insert some footage of a hot, sand-infested ghost town somewhere with tumbleweeds blowing through it.

There just isn’t much info out there on the “Trusite Mini Cam”. No reviews, write-ups, specs, etc. There are a few “what’s this worth” pages and a PDF of the original owner’s manual. It appears that they were made by Trusite in New York, USA in the 1940’s, with a pause during WW2 – probably because the factory was making product for the war effort. A lot of them were made and sold in 1947, including a Girl Scout version that had a green front plate.

The owners manual had almost no info in it at all – nothing about shutter speed, f-stop, etc. Basically, it said that you should shoot black and white 127 film in it, and everything past 3 feet should be sharp.

Challenge accepted!

After Troy dropped it off at my desk, I was able to check it out. The shutter was stuck and didn’t work, and the lens and separate viewfinder were very dirty. After about an hour of cleaning and some lubrication on the shutter, I was able to get it up and working. Looking at the opening on the single-element miniscus 50mm lens and watching the shutter actuation, my guess was that it was a fixed aperture of somewhere around f/11 to f/16, with a shutter speed somewhere around 1/40th to 1/50th of a second. This meant that on a sunny day I’d probably be fine with a roll of ISO 100 film. I think ISO 50 would have been ideal but I don’t have any ISO 50 film in my 127 film collection.

First, a little about the original owner. The camera was owned Troy’s uncle, Norman Flaker. He was in the US Air Force and was based in Alaska in the late 1950’s. He would shoot images with this camera and mail photos back to his mother (Troy’s Grandmother). So this is a well-travelled camera that has been in the family since it was originally purchased in the late 1940’s. In recent years, it’s spent its time on a shelf, and has not been shot in probably 40 to 50 years.

I loaded the camera with a roll of Rerapan 100 on a bright sunny day that had blue skies and puffy clouds, and headed to downtown Dayton, Ohio to do a short lunch walk along the river near the small neighborhood of McPherson Town.

Shooting is fairly straight-forward – roll the take-up spool until you see #1 in the right red window on the back, take your picture, then roll the film forward until the #1 sits in the left red window. This makes it what we would today would call a “half-frame” camera, giving the user sixteen 3cm x 4cm images instead of the usual eight 6cm x 4cm images. Back in the day film was expensive for most (sound familiar) and this camera was marketed as an economical way to shoot. Of course, by the next few decades cameras like the Trusite would fall by the wayside, being replaced by affordable 35mm cameras that were easier for most to use and offered the protection of the film in the form of a cartridge format.

Because of the half-frame orientation, the camera takes vertical aka “portrait” orientation images, with a matching viewfinder. It is somewhat weird looking thru a vertical viewfinder, and needing to turn the camera on its side to take a horizontal “landscape” image, but I imagine one could get used to that fairly quickly if it was their sole camera.

A few days after my walk I was able to develop the film in Rodinal mixed in the 1:100 ratio, in a semi-stand method, for an hour at 68F degrees. Images were scanned on my Epson V600 scanner. Below is the contact sheet with all 16 images as shot.

So, I’ve got images! That’s a win in my book!

Of course not all of them are “bangers” as the young kids would say, but a few were worth editing a little further in Photoshop to be final images.

Some thoughts on the images above. None are really sharp by today’s standards. They have a bit of a “dreamy” look, and remind me a lot of shooting a Holga camera. Also, there are a lot of scratches on the film due to the film being dragged across the 4x4 opening behind the lens, which is metal and not protected at all. I anticipated that there would be scratches, and there were actually less than I expected. I left most of them in the edited images to add to the “look”.

All-in-all it was a lot of fun – cleaning it, getting it back into working condition, shooting, and then being surprised when I saw actual images when I pulled the developed film out of the canister.

This is one of those cameras that looks great on the shelf, but if I owned it I doubt that I would shoot it again. 127 film is relatively expensive at the moment due to its limited availability, which means that when I do shoot it I’m probably looking to get a little better image quality. But if I was looking to do a project that had a certain dreamy look and a retro feel, it would be a great tool for that.

If you are interested in picking one up, there are a few on eBay at the moment ranging from $10 to $50. I’d suggest looking at one that is in the best shape you can find, and hopefully has been tested by the seller to be fully functioning. Unless you are really into fixing old cameras like me and like a challenge!

Have you shot a Trusite mini cam before? Is one sitting on your shelf that belonged to a family member in the past? Let me know your thoughts and your experience with them.

Thanks for reading!

Jeremy