C41
Kodak Portra 400
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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rangefinder-medium-format
The Ensign Selfix is a folding roll-film camera produced by Houghton-Butcher Manufacturing Co. Ltd. of London, introduced in 1948. It produces 6x9cm negatives on 120 film, yielding eight exposures per roll, though some variants offered a 6x6cm mask for twelve exposures -- the "12/20" designation reflecting twelve 6x6 or eight 6x9 exposures on 120 film. The Selfix occupies the mid-tier of postwar British folding cameras: more capable than the basic Ensign Popular line but below the Ensign Autorange with its coupled rangefinder.
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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 Portra 160 is a professional C-41 color negative film with fine grain, soft contrast, and natural color.
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Kodak Ektar 100 is a fine-grain C-41 color negative film with saturated color and high sharpness.
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About this camera
A postwar British 6x9 folding camera producing eight frames on 120 film, made by Houghton-Butcher with a Ross Xpres lens.
| Field | Value |
|---|
| Format | 120 film, 6x9cm (8 frames) or 6x6cm (12 frames) with mask |
| Lens | Ross Xpres 105mm f/3.8 (primary variant) |
| Shutter | Prontor-S or Epsilon, ~1s to 1/200s + B |
| Focus | Scale focus; estimated to ~1m minimum |
| Viewfinder | Direct optical eye-level finder |
| Front | Self-erecting folding standard |
| Body | Die-cast alloy, leatherette covering |
| Battery | None |
| Years | ~1948-1957 |
Houghton-Butcher was the dominant British camera manufacturer through the early twentieth century, producing cameras under the Ensign brand name. The Selfix line represented the company's postwar attempt to continue serving the amateur and semi-professional market with a capable folding camera at a domestic price point, at a time when German and Japanese competition was rapidly expanding.
The Selfix 820 (as it was also marketed, the "8/20" designating eight exposures on 120 roll film) was introduced in 1948, three years after the end of World War II, during which British camera manufacturing had largely been suspended or redirected. The postwar market was hungry for photographic equipment and Houghton-Butcher's manufacturing capacity was positioned to meet domestic demand.
The Ross Xpres lens fitted to the Selfix was made by Ross Ltd. of London, another long-established British optical firm. Ross had a reputation for producing sharp anastigmat lenses, and the Xpres design was a four-element lens in the tessar class suited to the 6x9 format. The pairing of a Ross lens with a Prontor shutter on a British body reflected the typical postwar arrangement where British manufacturers sourced shutter mechanisms from Germany while fitting domestic optical glass.
Houghton-Butcher effectively ceased camera production in the mid-1950s as the British camera industry contracted under increasing competition. The Selfix line ended around 1957, and the Ensign brand largely disappeared from new camera production shortly after.
The Ensign Selfix represents one of the final expressions of the British folding camera tradition, a lineage that had been commercially significant from the Edwardian era through the early postwar period. British cameras had been exported throughout the Commonwealth countries, and the Ensign brand was recognizable across Australia, Canada, India, and other markets where British goods dominated import trade.
For contemporary film photographers, the Selfix is of interest primarily as an affordable route to 6x9 format photography. The Ross Xpres lens, when clean and in good adjustment, produces negatives with character consistent with the tessar-class designs of the period: good central sharpness with some softening toward the edges at wider apertures. The 6x9 negative size is large enough to yield substantial enlargements from 120 film, and the eight-exposure roll disciplines composition in a way that smaller-format cameras do not.
The camera also serves as a material artifact of British industrial photography culture in the late 1940s -- a period when domestic manufacturing was simultaneously recovering from wartime disruption and beginning to face the competitive pressures that would eventually end most British camera production within two decades.
BW
Kodak Tri-X 400 is a classic black-and-white film known for strong tonality, visible grain, and documentary character.
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