Canon V Bulk 35mm Film Cassette
WHAT CONDITION THE CONDITION IS IN: 88-Day Confirmed Operation Warranty. In working condition. This unit was well loved as seen by the brassing and finger wear marks on the case. Scroll down if you want to learn about the design, performance, and story behind it. Or don’t. It’ll be here either way.
Somewhere in Ōta Ward, Tokyo, in 1956, an engineer* whose name no one recorded decided that felt was insufficient. Felt, that humble textile cousin of the funeral home and the billiard table, had been keeping light out of camera magazines for some time, and he was done with it.
What replaced it was a rotating metal slit. It's a mechanism so quietly clever that it suggests the man had a certain personality type, the kind that also reorganizes hotel bathroom toiletries and re-ties other people's shoelaces without asking.
The Canon Magazine V is chrome-plated brass and steel. It has three pieces: an outer shell, an inner shell, and a central spool. They're assembled with tolerances that make the whole thing feel, when you pick it up, like it was never going to be any other way.
There's a word in Japanese, an-shin-kan (安心感), that means roughly the feeling of settled security, the sensation of a well-made thing held in a reliable hand. The Magazine V provides this. Whether you deserve it is a separate question.
The gate snaps open with a thunk that is slightly louder than necessary and entirely correct. Bulk film loads cleanly across polished rollers. There's no felt, no scratching, and no drama.
This assumes, of course, that you've trimmed the leader properly and haven't bent the small brass top pin, which is small, brass, and not interested in being manhandled.
Its blue high-impact polystyrene case, which has survived longer than most marriages, was not designed to be charming. It is charming anyway.
The Magazine V never bothered fitting older Canon bottom-loaders. It was built for the V, VI, P and 7 rangefinders, the cameras it respected, and declined to apologize for the others.
*Nobody thought to write down who actually designed the Magazine V. Canon's archives being, apparently, a monument to selective memory. But one needn't be a detective to smell Hiroshi Suzukawa's (鈴川博) fingerprints all over it, given that the man spent his career insisting that felt light traps were a personal affront and that a film magazine ought to behave like a proper piece of machinery rather than a glorified tin lunch box, a philosophy he pursued with the cheerful ruthlessness of someone who had never once in his life considered compromise a virtue.
