C41
Kodak Gold 200
Kodak Gold 200 is a daylight-balanced C-41 color negative film with warm color, moderate grain, and a classic consumer-film look.
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half-frame
The Pen F is a half-frame 35mm SLR with an interchangeable bayonet lens mount, a rotary titanium focal-plane shutter that syncs flash at every speed, and a porro-prism viewfinder that lets the body be flat-topped (no pentaprism hump). It's the only SLR — full-frame or half-frame — ever to use a rotary shutter at this scale, and one of the most distinctive camera designs of the 20th century.
Reference
Recommended film stocks for the half-frame-35mm format your camera takes.
C41
Kodak Gold 200 is a daylight-balanced C-41 color negative film with warm color, moderate grain, and a classic consumer-film look.
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Kodak UltraMax 400 is a versatile consumer-grade ISO 400 daylight-balanced color negative film with T-grain emulsion, delivering warm Kodak colors, fine-for-speed grain (PGI 46), and wide exposure latitude. Currently in production and available globally as a single-roll and multi-pack.
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Before you buy used
About this camera
The only half-frame interchangeable-lens SLR ever mass-produced. Yoshihisa Maitani's first masterpiece.
| Field | Value |
|---|
| Format | 35mm, half-frame (18×24 mm vertical) |
| Mount | Olympus Pen F bayonet |
| Years | 1963–1966 (Pen F); FT 1966–1970; FV 1967–1970 |
| Shutter | 1s – 1/500s, rotary titanium focal-plane |
| Flash sync | All speeds |
| Meter | None (FT has TTL CdS) |
| Weight | 470 g |
| Battery | None on Pen F (PX625 on FT meter) |
Designed by Yoshihisa Maitani — the same engineer who later did the OM system and the XA. The Pen F (1963) had no meter; the Pen FT (1966) added a TTL CdS meter coupled to a numerical aperture readout in the finder; the Pen FV (1967) was a meter-less FT body for photographers who didn't want the slightly dimmer FT finder. About 250,000 Pen F-series bodies were made before the line ended in 1970, when interchangeable-lens half-frame demand collapsed.
Three engineering decisions made the Pen F famous:
The Pen F is regularly cited as one of the most beautiful Japanese cameras ever made. It directly influenced Maitani's later OM system. In 2016, Olympus revived the name for a digital mirrorless body — sharing only the design language and the porro-prism flat-top look.
Pen F bayonet lenses. The 38/1.8 standard is excellent. Wide options: 20/3.5, 25/4. Telephoto: 60/1.5 (a very fast portrait lens for the format), 70-150 zoom, 100/3.5, 150/4, 250/5. Macro 38/3.5. Bellows, slide copier, microscope adapter — full system. Pen F lenses can be adapted to Micro Four Thirds with the right adapter (the digital sensor matches half-frame field of view almost exactly).
Ilford HP5 Plus is a flexible ISO 400 black-and-white film with classic grain and strong push-processing tolerance.
C41
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
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Kodak Tri-X 400 is a classic black-and-white film known for strong tonality, visible grain, and documentary character.
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