• In 1972 Kodak released their new 110 “pocket system” film format. This 13x17mm film was housed in a small 24-exposure cartridge, didn’t require rewinding, and made loading easy for anyone with at least one arm. In the mid-seventies Munich-based film company Agfa became the first third-party company to offer both film and cameras for this new format.
• The Agfamatic 2008 Pocket Sensor was the first camera to use Agfa’s “ratchet” operation system. The camera opened to the left by sliding a switch on the bottom. Once a photo was taken, the camera has to be pushed back together and out again, which advances the film and cocks the shutter. The noise the camera makes during opening and closing led to it being called the “ritsch ratsch” camera in Germany.

Another sliding switch unlocks and drops the film door, allowing the photographer to drop in a film cartridge. After closing it, a few ratchets of the camera advances the film to its starting frame. No amount of closing and opening the camera moves the film forward until the shutter has been triggered, a convenient feature considering that the camera is frequently closed and opened without taking a photo.

It has a 3-element Color-Agnar 26mm lens that is fixed at f/9.5, and two shutter speeds: 1/50 of a second and 1/100 of a second. A switch on the top of the camera selects the shutter speed, which is illustrated either as a cloud or the sun. Focus is fixed between 1.2 meters and infinity. The camera also came with a detachable flash bar and had a bright viewfinder with big parallax markers.