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.