During the latter half of the 1980s, the disposable camera went from a standing start to worldwide craze.
Fujifilm and Kodak had both investigated the concept, though seemed to be looking at it through different lenses. Fujifilm was first out of the blocks with the Quicksnap, which married a roll of the Japanese giant’s colour negative film with a simple shutter and aperture and a plastic lens. You shot the film to the end of the roll, then handed the entire thing in for processing. You got back your negatives and prints and no camera – it went to the great camera graveyard when the photo lab pulled it apart to get your film.
Kodak, who had already Fujifilm was developing a disposable camera before the Quicksnap appeared on the shelves, also unveiled a use-it-then-lose-it camera called the Fling in 1987.
Only one problem with the Fling; Kodak thought that 110 film – not the ubiquitous 35mm – was the perfect choice for a disposable. After only two years they ditched it and redesigned the Fling for 35mm film instead.
Disposable cameras sold first at a trickle, then a flood. Disposable cameras filled the same niche as mobile phones do today – the camera you take along when you don’t want to take your expensive “proper” camera. In the US, sales jumped from a little more than three million in 1988 to more than 20 million just two years later.
Fujifilm and Kodak were followed by other film manufacturers like Agfa and Konica, and all this first generation of disposables were broadly the same. A simple plastic body usually covered in a cardboard sleeve was discarded along with the camera’s simple mechanisms as soon as the film was removed. The concept of a camera that was completely disposable was something entirely new; previously, cameras had largely been considered expensive, prestige items.
“The original Quicksnaps and Flings were sonically welded together, which required them to be destroyed for the film to be extracted,” wrote Della Keyser in the blog Disposable America. “Camera companies could have recycled the destroyed plastic parts, but that would have meant additional costs. Consequently most single-use cameras ended their lives in landfills. As a result of these practices, by 1988 manufacturers were experiencing a backlash.”
The beginning of the disposable camera era came amid the start of consumer pushback against single-use items. At least one camera maker’s chief was among them.
In 1990, John Bourne was the president of Vivitar, a US photographic distributor which had started life in the 1930s as Ponder & Best and in the decades since had become one of the world’s biggest photographic brands – in some cases getting camera and lens manufacturers to make designs to their specification. After a turbulent 1980s, Vivitar has started to pivot from high end goods such as its well-regarded Series 1 range of lenses to cheaper goods such as point-and-shoot cameras.
Bourne wanted Vivitar to join the ranks of disposable camera manufacturers, but he didn’t want to contribute to the growing amount of waste produced by these use-once designs. He told Vivitar’s designer Steve Shull to come up with a “reusable disposable” which could be used again and again, but would still be easy to operate. Shull teamed up with Alan Stone Creative Services, and between them they came up with a camera that completely redefined what a disposable camera could (and should) be – the ECO35.
The ECO35 doesn’t look like rival disposable cameras, but like them it is ridiculously simple. It has only three moving parts – the shutter, the film advance knob and the rewind knob. The camera is smooth and curved and bulges out at one end: YouTuber David Mihaly (The Old Camera Guy) is completely correct when he says it feels like an old-school computer mouse. (Watch the video below.)
The ECO35 has a fixed focus 34mm lens with a fixed aperture of f/11; the shutter speed is also fixed and 1/125. Loaded with 200-ISO film, it would have been fine for outdoor photography on sunny days.
The ECO35 is completely black apart from a bright blur shutter button, sitting just in front of the oversized film advance knob. It looks more like a low-end compact than a shoot-once disposable, which it actually is. Virtually every other disposable was designed to only be opened when taken in for processing. The ECO35 has back door accessed by pressing a catch on the left side of the camera. You load the camera as you would any other simple compact.
The way Vivitar marketed the camera was almost unique. Vivitar sent film in bulk from Australia to China, where the cameras were made, and the film was loaded into each camera during assembly. (Early on the ECO35 usually came with 200-ISO film before Vivitar started using 400-ISO film.)
Once the film was shot, the photographer had three choices:
- Take it to be processed and disposed of like a normal disposable camera
- Ask the film lab to load the camera with fresh film so it could be used again
- Use the camera again with film they had already purchased
Vivitar intended the ECO35 to sell for a similar price to that of most other disposables, but they were essentially offering a loaded simple compact which could be loaded again and again and again as long as the photographer had access to fresh film: and if anything happened to it – well, it was cheap, so you could buy another one.
The ECO35 was introduced in 1990 and made an immediate impact – it won the 1991 IDEA Gold (Industrial Design Excellence Award) by the Design Society of America. Tucker Viemeister said of the camera: “You can use it and throw it away – or you can keep it and save the environment.”
“As a reusable disposable camera, the ECO35 breaks the mould,” wrote Bloomberg’s Bruce Nussbaum after the cameras won the award, in an article titled “To toss or not to toss“.
The ECO35 was successful enough for Vivitar to introduce a follow up. Spurred, perhaps, by the arrival of higher-spec disposable cameras with a battery-operated flash, Vivitar released the ECO35H, which added a flash hot shoe on top which you could attach a small flash unit. Popular Photography called it a “polycarbonate Brownie” in a 1991 round-up of cheap compacts, but was impressed with the results. “We loaded up the economical ECO with [Ilford] XP2 and shot in conditions from cloudy to bright sunny,” the magazine wrote. “And dang if it didn’t work. Granted, the imaging isn’t quite the equal of a more sophisticated autofocus P/S, but we think you get quite a lot for the money.”
The concept the ECO35 ushered in did not survive the 1990s: both simple compact cameras and colour print film became more affordable. By the time the 2000s arrived, digital started to make headway. While disposable cameras survived the changeover, the casual compact mostly folded once digital compact cameras became cheap enough.
But the “reusable disposable” camera didn’t die for good. Even before the digital take-over, Lomography unveiled a camera in keeping with the ECO35’s cheap-but-not-disposable ethic. In 2005, Lomography launched the first of its Lomolitos cameras, a disposable-like simple compact with fixed focus, shutter speed and aperture and pre-loaded with a roll of 200-ISO film.
Though the Lomolitos was discontinued by 2010, Lomography revived the concept again in 2017. Its’ Simple Use compact cameras – like the ECO35 more than 25 years before – came loaded with various Lomography films (from CN400 to Lady Grey to Metropolis). It offered a similar shooting experience to Vivitar’s design – with one big difference.
The ECO35 has a standard film take-up spool built into the camera, and you wind and rewind as you would any other manual advance camera. The Lomography Simple Use, on the other hand, requires you to advance all of the film out of the cassette before you can start shooting it.
The ECO35 might not have lived out to the bold claims of it saving the world, but it was a far-sighted response to the growing waste mountain produced by photography.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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