AUTOMATIC PHOTOGRAPHS.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 208, 3 September 1929, Page 3

AUTOMATIC PHOTOGRAPHS.

COIN-ITT-SLOT PICTURES. . AMAZING MACHINE AT MILNE'S. The old photographic tag about you pressing the button and some mythical "we" doing the rest, was hardly true when one came /to try the scheme out, but on the first floor of Milne and Ghoyce's huge warehouse in Queen Street there are two cabinets rather like improved telephone boxes where you can sit down and by putting a coin in the slot have your photograph taken by machinery. It is a most amazing piece of machinery, and though the Swedish inventor got a cool quarter of a million sterling for his rights, the British syndicate that took it over must have paid itself several times over. These two machines in Milne and Choyee's are the first in Auckland, but in Sydney there are 32 of them, while there is one at nearly every street corner in San Francisco and New York; London keeps 127 of them busy, they are quite the rage in Paris, and, in fact, all over the Continent they have caught the public fancy.. The machine is called the "Photomaton" with the accent on the "torn." Mr. C. R. Hagan, the company's representative, who is assembling th*> machines at Milne's, says the ones he put up in Wellington and Christchurch were simply rushed. It is not surprising, for in addition to the novelty of being taken entirely by machinery the sitter has the satisfaction of a capital picture. While the Photomaton is too complicated to permit of description, the mechanism may be likened to that of a cinema camera, only instead of taking a film the machine takes a picture direct on to paper, the paper being fed from a spool which carries 1000 feet. The sitter is taken in six different poses, and the pictures, two inches by one and a-half, are printed in a strip like a moving picture film. The taking occupies 15 seconds, the developing, etc., another 15 seconds, and then the strip goes through a heated drying chamber, and in six minutes the finished article falls out at the back of the machine into a receptacle. During the whole process the paper has never been touched by human hands. The mechanism of the machine is all electric, and in addition to taking and printing one's' picture with professional finish is obliging enough to show a lighted sign, "Next please" when it is ready for another sitter—and that is exactly 15 seconds after the ringing of the sixth bell to show that the automatic knife has severed your strip from the parent spool. After seeing this machine one can quite understand the marvels of a Robot.