30ies Usage of Small Medium Format Folders

[distributed]

I recently bought a 1930ies 6x4.5 cm Ikonta. Given that this camera celebrated it's 50th anniversary when I was born, I don't know how people used it and got their prints when the camera was new. However the little I know and my own experience got me wondering.

I hear that before the 50ies or 60ies it was most common to get contact prints, not enlarged prints, from your negatives. Lacking a medium format enlarger at home, I decided to go down the same route. Clearly, the usable image area of, say, 56x42 mm is not exactly large. Further compounding the issue is that I seem to have some trouble using the viewfinder, most of my portrait format pictures are aimed to high. After contact printing such a small negative I usually don't want to crop any more. I have made a negative that I believe is well framed and with subject matter that works on the small format. Contact prints from that negative seem like a small gem.

So how did people in the 30ies get their prints of smaller medium format cameras? Was 6x4.5 a format just used for economy? Or did they just wise up compared to me? Or did they use the format for snapshots because the cameras are so small? I would be interested in hearing about contemporary usage.

 

[voceumana]

Some of the early folders produced negatives of virtually post card size, and 2-1/4 x 3-1/4 inches (approx 6x9 cm) was a common folder size--more so than square or 6x4.5, I think. For the larger sizes, contact prints were of decent size--2-1/4 x 3-1/4 essentially being a wallet size print. For the smaller formats, small enlargements were very common even in the 1950's and 1960's (my 1st 2 decades of life!), at least in the USA.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the 645 format especially in a rangefinder--it doesn't get you that many more exposures on a roll, and you have to tilt the camera for horizontal format. My personal preference is for 6x9 (2-1/4 x 3-1/4 inches) in a rangefinder.