The Ihagee Parvola x Instax Mini restomod
My youngest child, a Uni-bound Fine Arts student, was gifted an Ihagee Parvola, a beautifully made German camera from the 30's. Unfortunately, it uses 127 film, long since obsolete and now only available from specialist providers. It is such a remarkable object - with a Carl Zeiss Jena lens, a clockwork Compur leaf shutter, and a truly unique dual concentric helical barrel extension mechanism - that I felt I needed to find a way to make it useful again.
There were only a few options - digital, adapt it to handle current film formats, or the most interesting one, convert it to an instant camera.
You can get full frame digital sensors for medium format cameras, but they are thousands of pounds, packaged for Hasselblads and other medium format cameras that share nothing with the Ihagee, and would require a significant amount of modification. A ground glass focusing screen would let a smaller sensor capture an image, but between the glass and the smaller sensor, much of the character of the camera would diminish. Digital was filed under "dead end".
There are specialist providers of 127 film, and even readily available kits to cut down 120 format film to fit a 127 camera. And 35mm can also be adapted by loading it onto old 127 spools. But those all require a darkroom and patience. Those are experiments for my youngest when they have access to their Uni's darkroom equipment.
I found some prior art on using Instax film with medium format cameras, which seemed like a very promising path. Some research turned up a delightful coincidence - the Parvola's 40X65mm film gate was very close to the Instax mini's image size of 46x63mm. More research turned up the Tomy KiiPix, an Instax mini camera marketed as a phone screen printer. I don't know why either. You stick your phone in a cradle above the lens and then take a picture of the screen. The good news is they were dirt cheap used. I got one for £12 shipped to my door and began ripping it apart.
The Parvola and KiiPix fit together surprisingly well. With some foam tape and hairbands, I managed to get a prototype together.
After some fettling of the optics and some guessing on shutter and aperture math, we picked up some film and tested it out.
I can't express the joy of seeing the first image slowly emerge from the instant film. This picture came from a hundred year old camera strapped to a kids toy.
We quickly emptied the cartridge to even more delight and surprise.
photo by Noah Sinclair
And the glitches combined with digital post-processing have opened up some interesting avenues for the kid to explore.
photo by Noah Sinclair
photo by Noah Sinclair
The Instax back has turned this vintage camera into a functional, surprisingly modern object. Lots to do to turn the prototype into a more robust device, though I'm torn on if I should polish away the comical charm of the two contrasting halves, or leave it as a proud signal of how absurd it really is.
There is a more technical post on the build here, which I hope inspires you to tape a KiiPix to your great-aunt's old Kodak Brownie and see what develops. If you do, please let me know how it goes by tagging me on bluesky @isinc.bsky.social