AGAT 18K Small But Powerful!!

One day accidentally I met my old friend. We haven’t seen each other for a long time, so we spoke for a while about how we are doing and so on. I told him about my new sickness LOMOGRAPHY, Cameras and films. My friend remembered that somewhere at home he has old weird Russian camera. Next day he brought to me that little plastic box and gave me like a present.

The first impression was really strong! That little black plastic body (95×60×45mm) and yellow setting disk with cute weather symbols knock my shoes off. This camera is really stylish and not only stylish , but really powerful and full of features. Just count all of those:

1. The legendary industar – 104 2.8/28 glass lens with manual focus from 0,9 to infinity.
2. Manual aperture f/2.8-f/16 and automatic shutter which set’s between 1/65 and 1/540 sec.
3. Hot shoe flash mount. This camera and colorsplash flash looks really amazing!
4. Tripod mount.
5. Frame counter.
6. Cable release socket.
7. Double more pictures. This camera is half frame format so if you load 36 frame film, you gone get 72 pictures. If you would take all pictures vertical, the result after normal 35 frame scanning would be two images in one frame. I really like that double image view. It feels like the pictures where taken with a multi lens camera :).

Loading a film was really funny, because to do that you need to split that camera in to two parts. I know that AGAT – 18k has a twin brother AGAT – 18. I don’t know the main differences between them, but I can tell one thing 18k settings wheel is labeled with ISO setting and older 18 model with GOST/DIN settings.

I have tested this camera in various conditions: Day light, Night, with or without flash, positive film and negative film. For conclusion I could say this camera is perfect for all conditions except night without flash. I was using 800 iso film, but still all pictures came really bad. “B” – shutter setting would really helpful in that case.
After all, AGAT – 18K it is really amazing tiny, spy camera with great number of features.

written by dogma on 2009-02-11 #gear #plastic #russian #35mm #review #vintage #half-format #aagt-18k