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The Kodak Six-20 was manufactured from 1932 to 1937. It cost $38 when new, which is equivalent to a whopping $606 today. It packs a 100mm f/6.3 Kodak Anastigmat lens, which is probably a three-element Cooke triplet type. It was considered a good quality lens at the time. The Kodon shutter is nothing special, though.

The camera sports two viewfinders. The first is a small “brilliant” type attached to the lens assembly that swivels to frame portrait and landscape photos. The second is a gunsight type attached to the camera body; it frames only landscape photos. As you can see, my Six-20′s brilliant finder is foggy.

What really set the Six-20 apart was its art deco styling. This photo shows not only some of those details, but that I needed to do a better job of wiping the dust off my camera before I photographed it. The button next to the film winder opens the self-erecting bellows. 

The Kodak Six-20 takes eight 6 cm × 9 cm photos on every roll of 620 film. I loaded some Kodak Plus-X 100 and went to town, albeit briefly, as it takes little time to snap eight shots. I shot using the Sunny 16 rule. Aside from the foggy brilliant viewfinder, the camera itself functioned well. But I’m not particularly happy with the scans I got back from the processor. Actually, they didn’t make scans – they photographed the negatives with a digital camera and reversed the images in Photoshop. The negatives look better than these images. I think I’ll use a different processor next time! But my habit is to show you photos from the first roll I shoot, and so here you go.

This is the shed in my back yard. I had to do some fancy footwork in Paint Shop Pro (because I’m too cheap to buy Photoshop) to make the image look this good. I used the gunsight viewfinder to frame this shot, but then cropped the image to improve the composition.

Manufactured by:
Eastman Kodak Co. Rochester N.Y. U.S.A

Year of manufacture:
1932 - 34.

Size:
8 x 5,7 cm.
2 ¼ x 3 ¼  in.

Film type:
620 film.