Editing Robot (camera) (section)

===Robot I===
Around 1930 [[Heinz Kilfitt]], a trained watchmaker, designed a new 35&nbsp;mm film compact camera using a 24×24&nbsp;mm frame format (instead of the Leica 24×36&nbsp;mm or cine 18×24&nbsp;mm formats). The 24×24mm square frame provided many advantages, including allowing over 50 exposures per standard roll of Leica film instead of 36. Kodak and Agfa rejected the design, and it was sold to [[Hans Berning]], who set up the Otto Berning firm.

Otto Berning was granted its first Robot [[patent]] in 1934; a US patent was granted in 1936.<ref>http://www.vintagephoto.tv/patents.shtml See "Heinz Kilfitt - Photographic Camera, 1936 (Robot Camera)" on this page for Kilfitt's US patent of "a photographic camera in which the feed of the film is effected automatically by a spring mechanism"</ref> The camera was originally intended to come in two versions: Robot I, without motor, and Robot II with a spring motor. Its release was delayed and already the first camera "Robot I" included its hallmark spring motor. The first production [[camera]]s had a [[stainless steel]] body, a spring drive that could shoot 4 frames per second, and a rotary shutter with speeds from 1 to 1/500th second. The camera used proprietary "Type K" cartridges, not the now-standard 35&nbsp;mm cartridges introduced in the same year by Kodak's [[Dr. August Nagel Kamerawerk]] for the [[Kodak Retina|Retina]]. The camera does not have a [[Rangefinder camera|rangefinder]], as it was designed for use mostly with short focal length lenses (e.g. 40&nbsp;mm) with great depth of field.

The Robot I was quite small, the body measuring 108 mm (4¼ inches) long, 63 mm (2½ inches) high, and 32 mm (1¼ inches) deep. A very sharp zone-focusing ''f/''2.8, 3.25&nbsp;cm Zeiss Tessar lens added 125mm (1/2 inch) to the camera depth. It was about the size of the much later [[Olympus Stylus]] although it weighed about 567 grams (20 ounces), approximately the weight of a modern SLR. The die-cast zinc and stamped stainless steel body was crammed with clockwork. A spring motor on the top plate provided the driving force for a rotary behind-the-lens shutter and a sprocket film drive. The film was loaded into cassettes in a darkroom or changing bag. The cassettes appear to be based on the Agfa Memo cassette design, the now-standard Kodak 35&nbsp;mm cassette not yet being popular in Germany. In place of the velvet light trap on modern cassettes, the Robot cassette used spring pressure and felt pads to close the film passage. When the camera back was shut, the compression opened the passage and the film could travel freely from one cassette to another.

The rotary shutter and the film drive are like those used in cine cameras. When the shutter release is pressed, a light-blocking shield lifts and the shutter disc rotates a full turn exposing the film through its open sector; when the pressure is released the light-blocking shield returns to its position behind the lens, and the spring motor advances the film and recocks the shutter. This is almost instantaneous. With practice a photographer could take 4 or 5 pictures a second. Each winding of the spring motor was good for about 25 pictures, half a roll of film. Shutter speed was determined by spring tension and mechanical delay since the exposure sector was fixed. The Robot I had an exposure range of 1 to 1/500, and provision for time exposures.

The camera had other features not specifically related to action photography. The small optical viewfinder could be rotated 90 degrees to permit pictures to be taken in one direction while the photographer was facing in another. When the viewfinder was rotated, the scene was viewed through a deep purple filter similar to those used by cinematographers to judge the black and white contrast of an image. The camera had a built-in deep yellow filter which could be positioned behind the lens.