Agfa Isoly 1

 

The inspiration for the plastic Diana Camera and all its clones, only better made, easier to focus, and with a better lens and shutter. Inexplicably, it is nowhere near as popular.

The Isoly 1 was introduced in 1960. It has a 55mm achromat lens with a choice of f/8 or f/11 and an Everset shutter with speeds of 1/30 and 1/100, plus bulb mode. It has double exposure prevention, with an indicator that goes from white to red after you have taken a shot, and a hot shoe on the top plate. The shutter release is also threaded to take a remote cable. The distances are marked in feet and metres around the lens, unlike on the Diana, which uses zone focusing. It takes 16 4x4 frames on 120 film.

One excellent thing about this camera is how easy it is to load because the lower tabs beneath the film spools flip out the way. This is a really nice feature and makes it one of the easiest cameras to load and unload in the collection, the other being the Harrow, which copied this feature.

There's not much else to say about this basic camera, except that it's better than a Diana and it's cheaper, so you should totally buy one of these instead.