The clever camera code on rolls of film

Yep. It's a video!

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[RealEngineering]

If this is no effort, half of YouTube must be asleep when they upload 😂

[captainchaos]

When "no effort" content is more interesting and better produced than 99% of YouTube

[mjs]

I really love the "Friend who spent a little too much time on the Internet last night after getting hooked on some random topic waiting on you to wake up the next day to tell you about it" vibe that No Effort November brings.

[zakpappnase]

My dad worked for the company that printed the outside casing for films for Kodak in the UK.
They were a relatively small firm, and Kodak had made a big deal about the specifications and the accuracy etc., it was a really important contract for my dads firm.
Shortly before the launch of the films with DX, they were approached by someone from another company asking if they could do some printing for them too, after the first meeting it was obvious this was exactly the same DX encoding. They all panicked, and didn't know what to do, but decided they had to contact Kodak and tell them that this other firm had their technology and it didn't come from them.
Well kodak were both delighted and completely non-plussed, they had forgotten to tell my Dad's firm that it was going to be an open standard and that they could go ahead and bid for the other contract as well.

[lifeinhd]

I have not touched a film camera in over a decade and a half. I am unlikely to ever touch one again in my lifetime. And yet, I just watched a 17 minute video about markings on film canisters, and enjoyed every second of it. Your channel never fails to impress.

[MysteryManBob]

"I don't know why Canon overcomplicated this" is an evergreen sentence echoing through the annals of time in the hairline-reducing world of camera repair

[JoshuaJonah]

I worked all through high school in a Fuji-based photo shop. All of the "leniency" and "will be fine" you described was on the technician printing them. We manually adjusted every print exposure.

[Nabeelco]

Some later cameras would fully spool the film when first loaded, so when pictures were taken, they'd immediately get spooled back into the film canister, so accidentally opening the back of the camera would only ruin your last picture, and some of your unused film.

[gaijininja]

I worked in a photo retail store for a year, so bought a staff discount, cost price dark box. I would load my film at home in the dark box so I wouldn’t lose the first two frames, and would carefully force the film right to the end. As most labs charged by identified film length, getting 28 frames for the print cost of 24 meant I got a whole film for free after every sixth.

[TheTonyMcD]

Wow, the effort that you put into these videos is truly incredible! I can't imagine doing all of that research, procuring all of the props necessary, coming up with such simple and relatable explanations behind the way things work, and not to mention the actual filming itself. It's wonderful that we have creators dedicated so much to their craft that they never, not for an instance, fail to put in the required effort in to create such great content.

[BBtech]

I've got to be 100% honest with you, because we're on the internet and it's easier to be brutally honest here, this was not a no-effort production. You most certainly showered, dressed, took multiple takes, did some B-roll, and edited this video. Next year, I'm going to have to insist that you roll out of bed, skip showering, and do a one-take YouTube Live Stream in your pajamas. Reading chat takes effort, so you can mostly skip that unless they throw money at you. The best part is if enough people do that, you'll start wondering if you've picked the right YouTube business model! XD

In case I haven't said it before, I love the content and always get excited when I see a new video! TY!

[bwofficial]

This channel never fails to show that the past was far more advanced than we remember it being. I never even thought that cameras would automatically compensate for film speed.

[kkobayashi]

I wonder if Canon's dual contacts are for redundancy. Otherwise a dirty contact could ruin a whole roll of film, which would be disastrous for a professional photo shoot. You should try covering one up and see if it still reads the DX code correctly.

Edit: Actually I was wrong, as some have pointed out. He clearly says and shows (7:40) that the Canon does not have contacts for the common ground. So there is no redundancy.

[kentslocum]

I love that Technology Conections acknowledges and addresses the nuance of these topics without needing to fully explain the complexity. Simply mentioning the fact that detail has been skipped over allows viewers to conduct their own research without starting from scratch. Thank you for making complicated topics exciting and accessible without over-simplification!

[TheSourKraut]

Dammit! I just now learned what I needed to know back in 82 when I was tasked with taking the pictures on a school trip and I messed them all up because ... well, I had no idea what I was doing but was the only one with access to a nice, fancy Yashika camera, not just a cheap compact (which, ironically, would have made actual pictures instead of 3 rolls of bright, white prints)
Yeah, I was NEVER allowed to be in charge of ANYthing again.

[almostfm]

When I was in HS back in the early 80's, the school had a very nice telescope, complete with a dome. I used to use 1000-speed film for astrophotography (I don't remember 1600 being available). The only problem I had was getting the development place to actually do prints of every shot-they'd typically develop it and then tell me "We didn't do any prints, because the negatives just had a bunch of black spots on it".

[Leoine]

Alec, thank you from the bottom of my heart for making November my favorite month, and for making me a smarter person overall. Oh yeah, and for making the world smarter too. You're up there with PBS in terms of sheer public-good.

[bohicajohnson]

As a technophile, this is one of my favourite channels. I like to think that I am up to speed with things technical, yet most of the content is new ground for me.

[craigjoe]

I used to work at FotoMat in the early 90s and would save every roll that had the encoding patterns on them to resell to people who would refill their film because it was significantly cheaper than buying new.

[gsuberland]

Regarding the weird DX contacts on your T90 at 7:20, the service manual indicates that each pair of pins is electrically continuous, so each position is in fact being tested against the common position at the top of the roll, rather than each contact pair acting like a single SPST switch. The doubling up of contacts was almost certainly to improve the reliability of the connection.