50mm-color-optical-lens-toy-camera-with-1000-names

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About 50mm-color-optical-lens-toy-camera-with-1000-names

If you have a Time Magazine camera, the Photoflex MX-35, Meikai 4351, or a Lavec toy camera, read on!

This is a place for images taken with the ubiquitous 1980’s toy camera with the 50mm “[insert nonsense here] Lens.” The camera has suffered an identity crisis because essentially it’s always turning up with a different name. The manufacturer must have branded hundreds of them, the most (in)famous being the Time Magazine camera that shipped as a gimmicky gift with new subscriptions in the 80’s. In any case, once you’ve seen or handled one or two of them, you can easily pick them out of a lineup. They all seem to have these features in common:

- Made in Taiwan
- Three to four stop settings marked with stop numbers and/or weather symbols
- 50 mm lens with some nonsense printed around the lens barrel . This includes but is not limited to: color optical lens, optical color lens, new optical lens, kinetic optical lens, [brand name] glass lens
- Many also have a six digit serial number printed around the lens barrel.
- Hot shoe, tripod mount, and some have a remote cable release.
- Characteristic light leak profile -- “flames” that show up as long repeating triangular areas on the right side of the frame .