THE FUJIFILM INSTAX WIDE 400 INSTANT CAMERA
The easiest way to take foolproof party photos
Producing a Polaroid Land camera at a party or family gathering in the 50s, 60s, and 70s—the height of old-style Polaroid’s popularity—was quite a ceremony. Some wealthy person who could afford the film would unfold the enormous apparatus, looking more like a Speed Graphic press camera than a fun machine for snapshots. They would then fire off a single photo, whereupon there would be multiple “oohs” and “aahs” as a tiny photograph of modest quality slowly developed.
Fujifilm’s Instax brand has for the past eight years taken the Polaroid instant-photo-print ball and run with it—no small achievement in the Digital Age. Even Leica’s sleek, $399 Sofort 2 instant camera, which we featured here last December, is based on Instax film.
Stylistically, this new wide-photo, instant-picture model from Fujifilm is more Polaroid Land than smoochy black Leica. It’s big and kind of artfully present, even cumbersome, designed to be noticed. So most definitely not the right camera for discreet street photography. It’s for social occasions when three or four happy people want to grin together across the large-size Instax prints, which measure just under four inches by two and a half. Fujifilm will try to convince you that people will take it on hikes to capture landscapes, but they won’t.
The Wide 400 is analog all the way, with a clip-on close-up lens and manual settings for different scenes. There’s a self-timer dial, as users are bound to want to take selfies. Film costs are not inconsiderable, but not as bad as when your rich uncle was showing off at Christmas in 1973. It’s $31.50 for 20 color prints, or $24.99 for black and white, which could look rather good. There’s also a black-border version for color photos, which your columnist is less sold on.
THE CASIO A1100D-1VT WATCH
The watchmaker’s vintage line is having a nostalgia-fueled resurgence
Casio is one of those brands from early into the personal-technology boom that, like Nokia and Sharp, has rather slipped from the mainstream without doing a full Palm or Compaq and disappearing entirely.
Yet, although you might think classic 80s-style Casio digital watches are a little obsolete these days—people either have a smartwatch, a mechanical watch, or a quartz watch, or they just use their smartphones to tell time—vintage-looking Casios are having a moment as a fashion item.
I was given this surprising tip by a specialist mechanical-watch restorer (full confession—my son) who explained that Casio watches are particularly hot among millennials like him, while “old people like you love old Seikos.”
“Ask Rebecca Struthers,” he said. “She wears Casio watches.” Struthers is a watchmaker in Birmingham, England. Watches made by her and her husband, Craig, sell for $50,000-plus, so I was skeptical. But the 38-year-old, one of the world’s few Ph.D.’s in horology, confirmed when I called her that she is indeed a big Casio fan. “You wouldn’t want to wear a valuable watch in the workshop,” she explained. “And Casios are so reliable and so stylish. I absolutely love them. It’s also not a disaster if you damage one.”
Which Casio model to go for? The choice is huge, and Casio doesn’t push its vintage range much—they are mostly overshadowed by the visually noisier G-Shock models, which originally got Struthers into the brand, in the 1990s. (Casio declined to respond to questions about their vintage-style watches when contacted by AIR MAIL.)
This columnist’s choice—given that he is old, according to his son—would be the shiny, $135 A1100D-1VT. Seeing as classic Casio watches start as low as $14, for the classic F91W, $135 is practically high-end. The F91W, however, comes with a possibly unwanted bonus: it is notorious with Western security services as the preferred watch of terrorists, and was, indeed, found on the wrists of not only Osama bin Laden but also on more than 50 al-Qaeda suspects housed at Guantánamo Bay.
Two other random snippets of Casio history: The company was known as Kashio when it was founded, by Tadao Kashio, in 1946, and before watches brought out a fully electronic calculator, the 14-A, as early as 1957. Kashio’s first-ever product, however, wasn’t electronic. It was the Yubiwa Pipe, a finger ring designed to hold a cigarette so the user could do other tasks while sneaking regular puffs.
Radio Garden
Tune in to radio stations from abroad in the comfort of home
During the past 25 years or so, most of us have experienced sheer astonishment at the things it’s possible to do on the Internet. Discovering Google Street View was and remains one of this writer’s most profound moments.
Radio Garden, a Web site run as a nonprofit in Amsterdam, is a very close second. Perhaps it’s even better, because sound is so much more evocative than pictures.
Radio Garden allows you to travel the world by listening to its radio stations in real time. You spin a beautifully depicted globe, alight on any one of thousands of bright-green dots, and within seconds are hearing a local radio channel live.
I thought Radiooooo, the site I wrote about earlier this month, pretty much hit the end stop for compelling distractions. On Radiooooo, you click on a country and a decade to listen to a selection of its popular music from that era, going back 100 years. You can easily spend hours at a time on the platform and still come back for more the next day.
On Radio Garden, though, you hear what the locals are hearing right now, and even if you can’t understand the language, it’s utterly fascinating. In a typical few minutes, you might go from an early-morning political rant on Radio Ciudad del Mar in Cienfuegos, Cuba, to a lunchtime music show on Irebe FM 91.4 out of Bujumbura, Burundi, to an early-evening program on Radio Vatsa Gulm FM 90.8 in Washim, India, to a late-night show on Guangxi RGD Music Radio from Nanning, China, to operatic-style choir music in the small hours on Radio Pyongyang, in North Korea, to an early-morning news roundup on Akaroa Radio on New Zealand’s South Island.
As someone particularly charmed by small British islands in far-flung places, I’ve come to love catching up with the gossip from Port Stanley on Falkland Islands Radio, hearing details of the latest fish fries and burger nights from Saint FM 95.4 on lonely Saint Helena, and grooving to contemporary Shetland Islands music from 60 North Radio out of Hillswick, a tiny village in the northern part of the islands.
What Radio Garden is, when you think about it, is a modern, high-quality version of shortwave radio from decades ago, when you would tune across the crackly bands late at night in the hope of hearing live propaganda shows such as Radio Moscow and Radio Peking. That was exotic and exciting, but you were hearing content made in English specifically for export. With Radio Garden, it’s completely authentic radio produced for locals.
One note of caution if you are in the United Kingdom: for reasons only known to boring lawyers, Radio Garden can be used only for British stations in Britain, which rather defeats the globe-trotting point of the thing. However, if you use a V.P.N. (ExpressVPN or NordVPN, for instance), Radio Garden works just fine in the U.K.—with the added benefit that you will be making boring lawyers cry.
The Tivoli Audio Model Two Digital Loudspeaker
A superb speaker from the makers of the century’s most popular radio
Boston radio brand Tivoli successfully re-invented the seemingly obsolete plug-in “table radio” for the 21st century. When it came on the market, in 2000, their Model One was a clever and counter-intuitive venture by the M.I.T.-educated electronics engineer Henry Kloss and Massachusetts entrepreneur Tom DeVesto. Soon after launch, stylish Tivoli radios could be found in kitchens and on nightstands all over the world.
Tivoli has since changed ownership, but is still Boston-based and produces a range of design-forward radio-type products, including the recently released Model Two Digital, which would have been hard to explain back in 2000 because it isn’t a radio at all.
The Model Two is a very slick and compact high-end loudspeaker built to stream content from other sources, be that a cell phone or computer, or with direct connection by Wi-Fi to streaming-music services. Just one clever thing about the fetching Model Two is that it works whether set horizontally or vertically. Both the build and sound quality are exemplary.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
