Square Format Pictures

Square format pictures used to be popular in the 60's and 70's. I wonder why the format faded and the rectangular 2x3 format came out and became the standard? It would have been just as easy for camera manufacturers to make smaller cameras that made square pictures on 35mm film. You would have gotten more pictures on a roll than the standard 24 or 36.

I have two square format cameras: A small Yashica 44A Twin Lens Reflex that uses the now out-dated 127 roll film and a Yashica Mat 124 that uses 120 roll film. The 44A makes 4cm x 4cm megatives while the 124 makes 6cm x 6cm negatives.

I've been itching to take these cameras out. A Croation company called Efke still makes B&W 127 roll film for the 44A. I read somewhere that they use blind people in their assembly line and keep their facilities totally dark...makes sense. I bought 5 rolls on ebay at a decent price. I also have a 120 roll of B&W Ilford Pan F lying around. Unfortunately, I can't go out and buy scanner I want to scan the negatives after I've processed them at home. I could print them on a contact sheet and then scan them on my current flatbed, but I can't really afford the paper and chemicals right now either so the whole project will have to wait until I've got a job.

In any case, I was browsing on ebay again for some other medium format cameras and got to thinking about why camera makers don't make a square format digital camera ? I suppose that you can always crop a picture so that it's square, but that would involve lots of time at a computer just to get an album together. To take it a step further, the camera makers don't even have to change their hardware at all, just put an option on the software side for a square format that would invovle an automatic crop.

After digging around the web for a while a came across a square format digital camera from Rollei, one of the manufacturers of the best TLR cameras. Have a look at it here. It looks more like a toy, but it does work. I wonder where you can buy them here in Canada...

A little more digging around and I found this site that talks about square format 35mm cameras.

In any case, have a look at some square pictures here and here to get a feel for the format.