Besides the problems created by the black and white film size and the degree of magnification, the designers and engineers had trouble fitting their ideas into such a small scale. To help them over this discouraging psychological hurdle, the chief of the design team set up a permanent exhibit. He took apart a fine watch, arranged its minuscule parts on a piece of black velvet, and placed a binocular microscope nearby for viewing them. Whenever a member of the team became discouraged with the problems of miniaturization, he could step up and study the watch parts, and be reassured. New feats of miniaturization were indeed necessary. For instance, the camera requires a large number of tiny metal gears and levers. Ordinarily such parts are machined from solid metal, a process that is both time consuming and costly. But there is a modern way to make precision parts by molding them from finely powdered metal. The powdered metal is pressed into a shape, much as aspirin is pressed into tablets, and then heated until the metal particles fuse solid. Unfortunately, however, the manufacturers who used the technique were unwilling to meet the specifications for parts so small; in fact, they said that it could not be done. So Kodak went into the powdered-metal business and made its own pressed-metal parts-some of them half the thickness of any previously produced by the process. A similar feat was performed with plastics. At first experts did not believe plastic parts could be made as thin-and yet as strong-as those needed by the camera. But they eventually succeeded in molding parts so thin 10/1000 inch thick-that they are rightly referred to as "flashes" of plastic. These problems with black and white film flatness, lens placement and miniaturized parts were shared by all five models (which range in price from about $30 to $130). But the more expensive models had special miniaturization problems of their own. Built into them are such conveniences as electronic devices and circuits that measure the available light and automatically control shutter speed. And in the most expensive model there are also a rangefinder and devices for automatically controlling the size of the aperture. In order to fit all this electronic gear into a cavity slightly more spacious than the inside of a pack of king-sized cigarettes, the designers shrank every component. The exposure information collected by the light meter is evaluated by three integrated circuits, each the size of the tip of a little finger; together they do the work of 50 transistors. The pea-sized motor that controls the aperture and the equally small electromagnet that operates the shutter are wrapped with copper wires, some of which are only 14/10,000 inch in diameter. The battery pack, encased in bright yellow or red plastic, looks like something from a box of Cracker Jack and weighs half an ounce, while the circuitry connecting the various electronic components is black and white printed on flat, flexible ribbon that wraps and bends its way around objects with far more facility than wires and also behaves more reliably. But successful miniaturization raised new problems that had nothing to do with machinery. One of these was dirt. A dust particle on a negative only 13mm by 17mm can blot out an entire area of the black and white picture. Dealing with this drawback required a new system of black and white film handling. The negatives are returned from the developer in strips, each strip encased in plastic so the black and white photographer need never touch the negatives themselves. A new camera, a new black and white film, new black and white film-handling aids and a new projector -even a new array of black and white film-processing machines for the commercial black and white photofinisher - all this adds up to a completely new system of black and white photography. The subminiature camera, after years of being considered simply a novelty, may finally have come into its own. And perhaps more important, the developments that made the Pocket Instamatic possible promise further progress in miniaturization-and greater convenience-for cameras intended for professional and semiprofessional work. A Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera Model 60.