The Alfie Tych Film Camera
This 35-mm. camera gives you the joy of analog photography—without the self-seriousness
The revival in film photography continues apace. Younger photographers in particular can’t get enough of the novelty of having to think about the photos they take, rather than snap away in the certainty that if they take a hundred shots on their phone or digital camera, one is bound to turn out O.K., likely by accident.
Besides what I’ll restrain myself from calling the shift toward mindful photography, and beyond appreciation for the richer, more textured images you can make on film, there’s something else deeply on trend—embracing the imperfection of photography as it was for the masses 50 or 100 years ago.
That is to say, putting it bluntly, using film cameras with basic, unsophisticated lenses to create not-very-good photos that are nevertheless quite lovely.
The trend began—as with, er, almost nothing else—in the old Soviet Union, where a Leningrad camera-maker, Lomo, had a line of cheap and rather cheerless plastic-bodied cameras with plastic lenses.
At some point in the 1980s, a clever, artistically inclined company in Vienna saw the potential in these devices for us capitalist running dogs, who in the era of superb 35-mm. cameras coming out of Japan and Germany found a freshness in the so-bad-they’re-good photos from Comrade Brezhnev’s Lomo. Lomography, which is the name of the Austrian company and the style of photography, became “a thing,” and the cameras are still produced there today.
While the U.S.S.R. was vaguely known from the 1960s onward for its camera-makers, the same could not be said of the United Kingdom. Yet British cameras were once a huge thing. I have a 1907 British Journal of Photography annual handbook, which includes literally hundreds of camera brands, some of which seem to have been a single photographic store making cameras in a back room.
Welcome, then, to a four-year-old British brand, Alfie Cameras, which is domestically designing and making two endearing, as well as mindfully bad and reassuringly pricey, film cameras—the Tych and the Tych +.
These are half-frame 35-mm. cameras, a format that squeezes 72 vertical photos onto a roll of film made for 36 landscape frames. The half-frame camera goes back decades but fell out of favor. My first camera, a secondhand Olympus I was given in 1971, was a half-frame and was fine to learn with. My dad, bankrolling my early photo career, appreciated that it used half the amount of film, which was more expensive then than it is now, in relative terms.
Half-frame has made a minor comeback recently, with the neat little $500 Pentax 17 cleverly pitching to Gen Z that it doesn’t just produce the grainy, slightly lacking pictures you love but does so, like your phone, in vertical frames.
The Alfie Tych cameras, however, are even more eccentric than the Pentax, as they have four lenses on a rotating turret, one of which, while technically a lens, isn’t really, because it’s a pinhole. Seriously: it’s 2025, and you can buy a camera with a pinhole mode.
I should also mention that Alfie claims Tych is the smallest 35-mm. camera ever produced—a Tych almost fits in the palm of one hand, although they are dense, well-built things made of aluminum, not flimsy plastic.
Instagrammably cute, winsomely unconventional, always a conversation piece, and producing lovably fuzzy—sorry, dreamlike—photos. What more could a Gen Z–er want?
The WellO2 Breathing Trainer
A kettle-like device to get your lungs firing on all cylinders
As any Finn will tell you, Finland is not a Scandinavian country but a Baltic one. Yet Finnish design is more quintessentially Scandi than anything the design studios of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway produce. When, for instance, Nokia phones were still Finnish, they were so much more stylish than what American competitors were producing.
All the more amusing, then, that this Finnish product, the WellO2 breathing trainer, looks like an electric kettle produced in North Korea.
But, as hideous and a little bonkers as it appears, it’s a terrific device, which I can tentatively say is curing me of my attractive snoring habit.
May I be struck down for using the words “breath work,” but the WellO2 trains you with breathing exercises to strengthen muscles in the neck and chest over, typically, a three-month period.
The WellO2 is indeed a kind of a kettle, but with a valve in the spout to partially block airflow when you blow into it for 10 to 15 seconds. The purpose of the hot (but not boiling) water in the body of the machine is to moisten the airways.
You could instead use an Australian didgeridoo to help with sleep apnea, but the sound of the traditional instrument is, arguably, more disturbing than snoring. (Seriously, though, research by the University of Zurich has found that didgeridoo playing does help with snoring.)
The WellO2 is good for general fitness, too. At least one top-ranking soccer club, West Ham United, in London, already uses it in training.
The UMIDIGI Note 100
Thwart street thieves with a decoy phone you won’t miss
Cell-phone theft around the world is increasing. Whether you’re in a city center at home or abroad, the chances of a little man on a moped snatching your precious electronic baby from your hands—and ruining your life for days—are really quite high.
My argument, however, is that you wouldn’t wave your laptop around on the street, so why flaunt your phone, which is probably more expensive and has more valuable data, such as banking apps and contactless payment cards, on it.
I humbly offer a solution I have adopted myself, which I think is so good that I almost want to be robbed just to spoil a thief’s day. It is simply to have a cheap phone to use on the street for navigation, consulting travel Web sites, checking whether it’s about to rain, and so on, while your real phone remains elsewhere on your person. Moped thieves rely on surprise and a speedy getaway, so, with my way, you can give them a surprise in return.
O.K., so how cheap is a cheap phone? The answer is: hilariously cheap—and insanely good.
This needs context. I bought one from Amazon for $50. It was quite unpleasant, but that was the point. What wasn’t so good was that it didn’t work at all. I returned it—a refund was sent immediately without issue—prompting the question of why they bothered selling the “PrzTlk” in the first place. Perhaps some of these esteemed devices do work.
So I upgraded to the $130 Umidigi Note 100, and it is truly sensational. It’s a genuinely well-made, large smartphone, with great features and good battery life, for about one-tenth of the price of an equivalent iPhone or Samsung. You don’t keep much data of value or interest on it, and can deactivate it quickly and remotely if it’s stolen.
Now I wave my Umidigi around, equipped with a SIM card loaded with around $20 worth of data, without constantly looking out for potential muggers. If one were to snatch it, it costs less than lunch to replace. And the idea of making a thief cry fills me with joy.
The Sunseekr App
Find as much shade—or as little—as your heart desires
Whether you like the sunny side of the street or not, this new free app, SunSeekr, is nothing short of superb. You input where you’ll be and when you’ll be there, and the app will tell you whether that spot, anywhere in the world, will be in the sun or the shade.
It’s especially good at recommending cafés, coffee shops, or restaurants where you might want to sit in the sun—or not. It’s equally useful for planning picnics and outdoor events.
It remains as much of a mystery to me today as it did 20 years ago, when the word “app” came into everyday language, how such things make money, but this is truly not my problem.
Highly recommended, and if you don’t agree, it will have cost you nothing.
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
