Rollei A110 Spy Camera!

I got a message from a friend recently asking me if I had become a camera collector. If I have it was not intentional and I am making plans to remedy the situation by selling and/or giving some cameras away. The truth is there are so many really cool and unusual film cameras available now for very little money that it’s hard not to want to get them all and shoot them.

One such find is the Rollei A110 shown above with another recent acquisition, the Yashica LM. I will discuss the Yashica in a future blog post. I included it here in the picture for size comparison so you can see just how tiny the Rollei is. I got the Rollei in an auction along with some other items for under $20. This tiny little “spy camera” is so cool and well-built I may just have to keep it.  It apparently makes incredible photographs too, especially for a 110 film camera.

I bought a Pentax Auto 110 a while back and was disappointed with the photos from my first roll. Since the film I used in it was expired and of dubious origin I am reserving judgment until I can run some better film through it. I have no such reservations about the Rollei however. Even with film of questionable origins the photographs were quite amazing as you can see below.

I have intentionally avoided 110 film format since it came out in the 1970’s because of the grain and image quality issues but this little gem may change my mind. The fact that the entire camera is not much bigger than the 110 film cartridge itself is pretty amazing too.

Although Rollei also made a model E110 with a light meter but had to be set manually, the A110 is a fully automatic camera with only the zone focus needing to be set by the user. It does have a light in the viewfinder that glows green when everything is okay to shoot and yellow or flashing yellow when the shutter speed is slow enough to warrant a tripod or other special support. With apertures from 2.8 to 16 and shutter speeds from 1/400 to 4 seconds this is a very versatile little camera.