135 Half Frame

The 135 film format was introduced in 1934, but in 1959 Olympus released the Pen camera which used standard film in an unconventional way. Instead of capturing landscape frames at 36mm × 24mm, it captured portrait frames at half that size, 18mm × 24mm.

With a half-frame camera, twice as many pictures fit onto a standard roll of film. For example, it was an economical way to get 72 exposures out of a 36-exposure roll or 48 exposures out of a roll of 24. Most of these cameras came out of Japan and the film is relatively rare.

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