Pentax Auto 110 vs The Pentax Q: A study in B&W
Film vs digital in the garden
I’ve always admired the Pentax Auto 110 camera system. Back in 1978, Pentax released the tiny 110 camera along with three lenses – 18mm, 24mm and 50mm. It was followed in 1981 by the Auto 110 Super and three more lenses including a zoom and an all-metal 70mm telephoto. They are fast f2.8 lenses.
Fast forward to 2011, when Pentax drew from its rich history of tiny, high-quality cameras and lenses and released the incredible Pentax Q digital camera. Little did the Pentax engineers and designers know back in 1978 that their tiny 110 camera lenses would make a comeback 30-40 years later on a miniaturized digital camera.
A simple, inexpensive adaptor is all that is needed to fit the tiny 110 lenses onto the Pentax Q. And theses tiny, manual focus lenses work beautifully on the 110-comparable-sensor size of the Pentax Q line of cameras.
The miniature Pentax Auto 110 film camera, left, compared to the tiny Pentax Q. Notice how the film size is similar to the digital sensor making a comparison totally appropriate.
I purchased an almost complete 110 system with four lenses, a camera and flash, with no intention of ever using the camera to shoot film. But, after some thought, decided to at least run a few roles of film through the camera to compare the miniature Auto 110 with the tiny Pentax Q.
The decision led me down the road to Lomography, which is the company behind the resurgence of shooting film with vintage cameras. I purchased three rolls of film from Lomography – a B&W stock, a roll of colour print film, and a roll of Lomography’s specialty film that I’ll unveil in the final of this three-part series. The Lomography Orca 110 Film can also be purchased through Amazon.
The Pentax Q fitted with the adaptor and a 110 lens together with the remaining Pentax 110 lenses and the Pentax Q 50mm for size comparison.
Garden showdown with 110 lenses
Using 40-plus-year-old lenses on a digital camera is great fun, but how do they compare in a shootout between the digital Pentax Q and the original Pentax 110 film camera?
In a three-part feature, I’m comparing the two cameras using the original 110 lenses – the Auto 110 using film and the Q series taking digital images.
And, what better way to start than with a comparison between black and white images – digital vs 110 film.
Be sure to read to the end for a special comparison involving a third tiny Pentax camera.
A word of note: Although both cameras used the original 110 lenses, different crop factors created by using the lenses on both cameras resulted in different images. As a result, I used primarily the 18mm on the Pentax Q digital camera and the 24mm on the Auto 110 film camera. No metadata is available with the film camera images and, because the camera decides the f-stop and the shutter without revealing that information to the photographer, there is no way of knowing the data.
Mounted to the Auto 110, the 18mm wide-angle lens has the equivalent angle of view to a 35 mm lens on a 135 mm format, the 24 mm (50 mm equivalent), the 50 mm (100 mm equivalent) and the 70 mm (150 mm equivalent).
If you are wondering how these lenses translate in the world of traditional 35mm on the Pentax Q series, consider the 5.35 times crop factor of the original Pentax Q and you are left with the following: 18mm = 96mm, 24mm = 128mm, 50mm = 267mm and finally the 70mm = 374mm. The same lenses on the Q7 or Q-S1 – with a larger sensor and a crop factor of 4.65 – results in the following: 18mm = 83mm, 24mm = 111mm, 50mm = 232mm, and finally 70mm = 325mm. These numbers are rounded off, but you get the idea.
Lomography’s Orca, 200 iso, B&W print film can be expensive to process.
I used Lomography’s 200 ISO Orca film stock in the Pentax Auto 110, and set the ISO to 200 on the Pentax Q. On the Q, a fixed F-stop was used with the introduction of a home-made rubber washer inserted into the adaptor. (See earlier post here for more information.)
First impressions: Not the best results?
My first impression of the film images was not favourable. I felt the amount of grain overpowered the image and made them almost unusable. That, of course, was simply an over reaction on my part after having used digital cameras for so long. The scanned film’s grainy images soon grew on me and, with a little tweaking in Lightroom, I began to appreciate the scanned images more and more.
The small size of 110 film has never been a favourate film for photographers looking for a fine-grain image. And, of course, the more it is enlarged the larger the grain becomes.
(To see all of my Orca B&W images, check out my photo gallery HERE.)
In this post, we’ll explore both the “straight out of camera (SOOC)” images, as well as some that have been developed further in Lightroom and Photoshop.
Let’s take a look at a few images, shall we?
A garden bridge (SOOC) leads to a magnolia tree just beginning to open in a local public rock garden. This scanned film image shows high grain compared to a similar digital image below photographed with the Pentax Q and 18mm 110 lens.
The same garden bridge photographed with the Pentax Q and 18mm 110 lens.
The same film image with a little de noise added in Lightroom results in a slightly more pleasant image.
Local historic building photographed with Pentax Auto 110 on Lomography’s Orca film stock. The heavy grain seems appropriate with the subject matter.
A digital image of the same historic building photographed with the Pentax Q. Notice that the image’s grain or noise structure is much softer in this image compared to the one above.
The shooting experience: Pentax 110 vs Pentax Q
The shooting experience between the film and digital camera was really quite different and definitely favoured the much older and simpler Auto 110 film camera.
The combination of the very bright built-in viewfinder on the film camera, together with the split-image focussing screen, made the experience of shooting with the vintage film camera a real joy, not to mention the ease of getting sharp images. (Of the roll of 24 B&W images, about 22 were useable.)
On the other hand, trying to manually focus using the LCD screen on the back of the digital Pentax Q was difficult at times, especially in bright daylight. Although the camera features magnification to assist in focussing, the ability to get perfectly sharp images was often challenging. This is where the Q’s fine assortment of autofocus lenses would have come in handy.
That’s not to say that shooting the 110 lenses on the digital Q was not enjoyable, it was. But, compared to the original film camera that the lenses were made for, it presented some challenges.
A garden scene with the Pentax Auto 110 film camera.
A similar scene shot with the Pentax Q.
The film image above after some tweaking in Lightroom.
Here are more images taken with the film and digital cameras that illustrate the difference in grain and noise between the two formats.
I’m not going to go into too much detail at this point, preferring to leave more details for part-two and -three of the series comparing the cameras and lenses.
This image shows one of our town’s historic buildings. It is a straight scan out of the camera with no tweaking done in post processing.
A similar image taken with the digital Pentax Q and 18mm lens.
Cherry tree scans straight out of camera.
A similar image photographed with the Pentax Q and 18mm, 110 lens.
Adding the Pentax I-10 to the group
Earlier in this post, I mentioned that I was going to add a third camera to this comparison. The Pentax I-10 is another miniaturized, vintage digital camera produced by Pentax just before the introduction of the Pentax Q, and one that fits into this comparison nicely.
A tiny threesome used in this comparison. From left: the Pentax Q digital camera, the I-10 digital and the Auto 110 film camera.
It has a similar-sized sensor but has a built-in autofocus lens that gives it an advantage over the other two cameras, especially if age makes getting proper focus more and more difficult.
Below, are a few comparison images adding the Pentax I-10 to the group.
Image taken with the Pentax I-10 digital camera with its built-in autofocus lens. You can see the fine detail that has been brought out in this image photographed at at 160 of a sec at f5.3 and ISO 80.
The Pentax I-10 creates a beautiful, smooth image with little to no grain (noise) in this image of a bridge in the garden.
Garden bridge photographed with B&W film SOOC with the Pentax Auto 110.
The same image as above after a little de noise added to the photograph in Lightroom. I also removed some distracting elements in the scene.
The Darkroom tackles processing and scanning the 110 film
The Darkroom was the lab I chose to turn my B&W 110 film into digital scans and negatives. I can say the process and the results were excellent, but the final price tag was not.
I’m not sure of the final cost, but between purchasing the film from Lomography, paying for the mailing costs from the Toronto area to California and then adding the cost of developing, scanning and mailing the negatives back to me, it was not inexpensive. In fact, the cost I’m estimating to be over $60 Canadian, made the whole endeavour something that only the most dedicated film photographers would want to turn into a weekly or even monthly habit.
A few times a year might be something to consider, but digital cameras have certainly turned me into a penny pincher when it comes to paying for images.
I know, however, that there is a growing number of photographers who don’t like or want to be bothered with the whole digital process preferring to have prints in hand rather than digital images to deal with on their computers. And, if you already own the 110 or a 35mm film camera, than the costs may not be too exorbitant.
I’m sure if you live in the U.S. and scan your own 110 film, the final price can be brought down considerably, but the high cost is certainly something that would make me think twice about shooting another roll of B&W, 110 film.
I’m told my next roll – colour print film – is much cheaper. Stay tuned.