Kodak Advantix F300

The only film camera that I've ever owned was Kodak Advantix F300. It was in my active roster from 1999 to 2002. Before that I used to borrow cameras from friends and used one-time-use -cameras. Kodak Advantix was very cheap. If I can remember correctly it cost 179 FIM at Anttila sale. The camera was a fixed-focus point-and-shoot camera, but was based on APS film so it was by far the easiest camera to use that I've ever seen.

The camera worked very well without any problems. The quality of the photos was just as could be expected with this kind of camera. Macro shooting was out of the question and since the focus was fixed the photo's weren't very sharp. The major letdown was the viewfinder that showed very different framing than the actual photo. Cheap cameras do have this kind of issues but sometimes it was very annoying since the APS film: when shooting using the widest photo size it might happen that the object that you were shooting was completely left out from the picture, if shooting something close to the camera! When I got more experienced on the issue I learned to shoot using frame-and-rise -rule: after framing the photo the camera was pointed a little bit higher to compensate the viewfinder error.

The quality of the photos was largely dependent on the film. The best quality came with Kodak's 200 ISO film. For example Fuji's film produced greenish photos and ISO 400 film got overexposed, although the camera should have be able to hande this kind of a more sensitive film.

One of the most memorable moments with Kodak F300 was when I managed to take a photo too close to Olkiluoto nuclear plant. Camera and the film ended up to Rauma police station and I had to go back to use one-time-use -camera for a while. At the moment my Kodak has retired. The total number of photos shot with it was about 500.