Why were disposable flashes prominent for so long?

Question

While reading this answer (and going down memory lane) flashcubes were mentioned.

That got me thinking: Why were these disposable flashes so common? And why did it take so long for electronic flashes to take over?

Wikipedia suggests the electronic flash was already compact and economically viable by the end of the 60s, but many of us still used disposable flash units in the 80s (and maybe 90s?). That took some time.

Was it for some technological limitation? Was it economically more convenient to keep selling disposables?

Answer 1

Electronic flashes existed, but they were bulky and inconvenient to use compared to the disposable flash cubes.

To get a reasonable number of flashes per battery or per charge, the battery had to be big. This also meant heavy. Flash units well into the 1970s were separate accessories that you hung over your shoulder. In that era, you'd often see professional photographers, especially journalists photographing indoor events, with all kinds of kit hanging from them. The flash unit was larger and heavier than the camera.

The kind of camera you picture was intended for the same consumers as point and shoot cameras are today. These people want cheap and convenient, and can't be trusted to use complicated equipment properly even if they would.

What made the flash cubes so much smaller and lighter was that the energy for each flash was stored right in the bulb. This was a magnesium filament that made a bright light for a short time when it burned. The energy in the magnesium was much more directly used to make light than the energy in a battery, so required less mass and size for the conversion. Unlike batteries, flash cubes were always ready, and didn't slowly (or not so slowly for the rechargeable battery technology of the day) loose their effectiveness when stored.

Answer 2

First, the real money for Kodak, Agfa, Fuji, Konica etc. was the amateur market. Kodak had built its business on the “Brownie”. This profit channel was the camera itself and its film. Camera sales fueled the sale of photographic paper and the chemicals of the process. Additionally their existed a worthwhile market for automated developing and printing equipment.

Again, it was the mass market that fueled the bulk of the revenue of the these giants of the industry. The heart of the market was an inexpensive camera. Kodak and others schemed for ways to increase the number of pictures their customers were taking. It was obvious that flash photography provided the means to take pictures indoors. Adding flash capability to the amateur cameras resulted in a huge boost in sales.

The electronic flash of this era was large and bulky and expensive. The flash was triggered by a high voltage charge dumped into a glass tube filled with xenon gas. The problem was, how do you get the needed high voltage from low voltage batteries? The answer is to use a transformer. You input low voltage and the transformer outputs high voltage. But wait, the transformer only works on AC electricity and the battery outputs DC. How to make AC?

The early portable electronic flashes used “B” batteries. The term “B” comes from the radio industry. The “A” batteries were ordinary low voltage batteries. The “B” batteries were heavy duty high voltage batteries and they were big. Portable radios of that era used both. To solve the DC to AC conversion, a vibrator circuit was used. This is a switch that opened and closed rapidly. The vibrator converted the DC to pulsating DC. This rapid off on simulated AC and it worked. The pulsating DC is then transformed to a pulsating high voltage. Next this high voltage needed to be stored, a capacitor is used. This devise allows electricity to be tricked in. The capacitor takes time to fill. The system is “go”. The photographer presses the shutter button; the capacitor dumps its charge into the flash tube. Now you get the wanted blitz.

All this was too much for an inexpensive camera. All these problems were solved with the advent of the transistor and the integrated circuit. Its progress that killed the flash bulb.

Answer 3

Why were disposable flashes prominent for so long?

Technology moved at a much slower pace back then, especially with regard to consumer cameras. For most of the 20th century, a camera was something you bought and used for decades. Even professionals, such as some of the photojournalist 'stringers' in my hometown, were using Speed Graphic types of cameras from the 1940s and 1950s as late as the 1970s!

For most of her life my mother used two cameras:

• A Brownie she got as a girl in the late 1940s when they were practically giving them away so people would have a need to buy film for them.
• A 126 Instamatic very similar to the one pictured in the question that she bought in the late 1960s and used well into the 1990s when cheap, easy to use compact 35mm point and shoots flooded the market.

In the last two decades or so she has used at least a couple of those 35mm compacts (that didn't last near as long as those first two cameras did before they stopped working) and at least four compact digital cameras over the last 12 years or so (that also were replaced due to no longer working properly). She only used two cameras in the first 50 years of taking photos, then at least six cameras in the last 20 years!

The consumer market back then was much more concerned with price than with technical performance of cameras. In a way this has come full circle, as most people today are happy enough with the results they can get with even fairly mediocre phone cameras that they're no longer buying consumer grade compact cameras that give much better image quality.

In the context of cost, one of the ways to enable the lowest possible price is to not put anything on the product that the consumer doesn't absolutely need to use it. This was the case with flash. Many, many people only took pictures in daylight and didn't need a flash at all. Flashbulbs and then later flashcards were pretty cheap relative to the increased cost of putting a built-in electronic flash in a camera. To add insult to injury, built in flashes consumed batteries at a rate that cost almost as much as the disposable flash cubes or cards did! It took a LOT of use of an electronic flash to offset the additional cost of the camera with one and the batteries to run it compared to the cost of using disposable flash.

Bear in mind that flashcubes and flashcards provided the energy for the flash from the chemical reaction in the bulb, not from a battery. A mechanical striker in the camera could produce enough current to trigger the flash without the need for high current batteries. Even the many cameras that did use batteries to trigger the disposable flash used miniscule amounts of battery energy per shot compared to a battery powered electronic flash.

Answer 4

Quite small (cigarette pack sized) electronic flashes were available in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were initially fairly costly, but the prices fell dramatically towards the end of that period.

"Hot shoes" were not yet prevalent and the flash unit had a trailing lead which plugged into a socket on the camera (my 1968 Minolta SRT101 has such a socket).

As has been pointed out, many people still had relatively ancient cameras (although I remember new box brownies on sale in the late '50s).

Those with 35mm cameras with adjustable or (OMG!) interchangeable lenses were widely regarded as "geeks", just as people with fully featured DSLRs are regarded today by those whose photography is limited to that facility on their smartphone.

The received wisdom was that the "big money" was in simple cameras, with prettier looks, but very little changed from box brownies. Instamatic cameras did adopt the standard 35mm film, but used a square 24mm format inside a loading cartridge which did all the messy stuff.

They were successful, and did offer flash contacts and accessory flash guns using bulbs (I had such a setup). Kodak was a "one stop shop"—you bought the film in their proprietary cartridge, and flashbulbs in the traditional yellow packet.

Agfa came up with a similar concept, but never quite caught up. As time went on, people became more affluent as well as dissatisfied with Kodak and their attitude, so the Instamatic market died away, as much of their market bought new Japaneses SLRs, and joined the once despised geeks.

Answer 5

Some points on why small or even built in electronics flashes weren't already gaining much more foothold in the 1960s/1970s:

• Films, especially color, in were significantly less sensitive back then (it seems common color films in the 1960s were around 25 to 64 iso), leading to

• Higher guide numbers (relative to film speed. Mind that some disposable flash bulb types have BRUTALLY high guide numbers for their size!) needed, making useful electronic flash units far bulkier, since

• To double the guide number, you need 4 times the stored and released energy, thus a sturdier and larger xenon tube and a capacitor 4 times the (physical and electrical) size, and also

• Capacitors optimized for small photographic flash (optimizing size and weight while being suitable for the application) likely only appeared on the market together with the widespread demand, while early units would just have used capacitors which, while optimized to stand the stress of rapid discharge, were meant for industrial applications where size and weight weren't key

• Also, to charge that capacitor from battery power (unless you REALLY went for a bulky, expensive, and heavy A/B battery scheme), you need an inverter. Early designs used mechanical inverters (choppers), which weren't small and also were an unreliable wear part. Transistors suitable for that kind of duty certainly were not inexpensive in the 1950s and likely weren't either in the 1960s. Mind that commercial switching power supplies and full size all transistor color TVs weren't economically viable until the late 1960s either (these need even more sophisticated power transistors though.. but the point is, power transistors weren't as much a given as today).

• Also, there was not much of an ecosystem for generic, small rechargeable batteries (and their chargers), nor were there alkaline batteries at dime a dozen prices. Many 1960s and 1970s electronic flashes still used built in or custom NiCD batteries and built in/dedicated chargers. Simple disposable batteries available in these days for cheap would have been zinc-carbon type, with not enough energy density to be sensible for electronic flash.

Answer 6

The simplest cameras in the 90s (like the one your post showed) did not have hot shoes or flash contacts. Cheaper to make, but no choice offered but bulbs. Users were used to bulbs, these users likely had no other flash, and the bulbs were of course a continuing source of sales.

The last several years, there have been $10 Kodak disposable cameras, including a builtin electronic flash and film. https://www.amazon.com/Kodak-Single-Camera-Flash-Packaging/dp/B00004SU73

In some cases, these discarded disposable camera bodies were salvaged and the flash removed for other purposes, for example high school water drop photography experiments.