Ricoh Auto Half

The Ricoh Auto Half is a simple thing of beauty. Small, compact, with a minimum number of settings or adjustments. This point and shoot does not even need to be wound between shots. It is spring motor powered and self-winds with each frame. With a fixed focus 25mm/2.8 lens and auto exposure via a selenium cell that surrounds the lens, this is the epitome of essentialist design.

Simply load film, set ASA, wind up the spool a few cranks, and you are good for at least 10 images. This thing is small... smallest I have seen besides the Agat 18k or Canon Dial, and way easier to use than either. My copy was an SE model which also has a handy self timer.

Alas the images themselves. When the shutter opened properly and the film plane was well aligned, they were great. But on 8 out of 72 images the shutter clearly did not open correctly. Then starting about two-thirds through the roll, something shifted on the film plane and all subsequent shots went very out of focus... in a pleasant, dreamy sort of manner. Then the last 10 frames had a nice big light leak across the middle.

The images here tell the full story. The shutter failure frames produce a vignette-within-a-vignette that is genuinely interesting. The suburban California subjects (the vintage truck, the palms, the Speed Hump sign half-swallowed by bird of paradise, the flowers growing out of the sidewalk crack) all came through with exactly the kind of accidental character that makes film worth shooting. The ones that worked really worked.

I loved using this camera but the images were all over the place. I like happy accidents in film photography, but these all combined to be too much to handle with any regularity. Yes, my copy is bad. I bought it as Exc+++ with a fresh CLA and have already contacted the seller. But how many copies would I need to buy to find one that worked? Then how long would it work?

I am really not sure how to answer those questions for myself or anyone else. But damn, this camera is cute.