Soho Tuon

Specification

Art Deco Credentials

Description

The Soho Tuon is a 120 roll film camera sold by Soho Ltd. in London, c.1933. Construction is of very dark red/maroon Bakelite. The body is complemented with brown leather bellows. The Bakelite body is embossed with a leather type pattern with geometric lines, boxes and circles. It has a generous amount of chrome fittings and design highlights. The camera has a chrome table stand. It is a strut folder but is not self-erecting. It is erected by pulling on a tab and setting the lens in one of two positions - 'NEAR' or 'FAR'. 'FAR' is for normal operation with depth of field to infinity, 'NEAR is for close-ups. It has a brilliant view-finder that swivels for portrait or landscape.

Film advance is indicated by two red windows and is not coupled to shutter. The two red windows are used to get 16 exposures from 120 film. The film is advanced until a number appears in the first window and an image is taken. Then the film is advanced until the same number appears in the second window. Then it's back to the first window for the next number.

The Tuon takes 16 6×4cm pictures on 120 film. It has a fixed-focus meniscus lens in an everset shutter with 'I' for Instant and 'T' for timed. In instant mode, the shutter is tripped alternately up/down for each frame. In timed mode the shutter fires with the shutter lever tripped in either direction. The measured shutter speed on this camera is 1/50 seconds

The camera has a tripod mount and a table stand on the base board.

Observations

I don't think the design of this camera was thought through. It uses the body moulding of the Soho Cadet which took eight 6 x 9 images. It has been modified to produce sixteen 6 x 4 cm images. This produced a camera which was cheap but was too large for the smaller images it exposed. Although technically sound, I suspect a photographer would prefer a camera having the same specifications but being much smaller and easier to handle.

How to Use