I love a good vintage camera auction on eBay. Maybe I love this too much, seeing as how over two dozen film cameras from various decades have made their way into my cabinet over the last ten years. All of these were purchased without any guarantee of whether their shutter speeds were accurate. This is something that can be easily verified on digital cameras, but how do you precisely measure the accuracy of a shutter speed setting on a film camera? This is where PhotoPlug by Filmomat comes in, the brainchild of Dr Lukas Fritz. It’s a very affordable tool that can tell you if your vintage camera’s shutter speeds are what they used to be when they first left the factory, or if you’re going to have to make some exposure compensation calculations before each click.
The Big Picture: PhotoPlug is a Tool That All Film Camera Enthusiasts Should Own
As cameras get older, there’s a fair chance that the shutter speeds aren’t as accurate as what they used to be. But without the right tool in handIt’s not much bigger than a headphone jack. It even looks like one, and at under USD 40 (for just the unit without adapter cables), it’s something everyone with more than one film camera should aim to buy. No, this isn’t a sponsored post; I just wish I had discovered PhotoPlug sooner. It’s helped me find out the accuracy (or lack thereof) of so many of my 35mm cameras in the last few days. All you need is a strong light source and either an Android smartphone, an iPhone, or an iPad to download their app to. Once you get the hang of it, PhotoPlug will make you want to test out shutter speed accuracy on any film camera you come across. It’s that simple to use.
I’m giving PhotoPlug a full 5 stars, and our Editor’s Choice Award for being a simple, affordable, and capable tool to help you understand if your beloved film camera’s shutter speeds are what they’re supposed to be.
Pros
- Costs less than USD 40
- Smartphone apps available for iOS, iPadOS, and Android are free to download and use. No adware or in-app purchases required
- The simplicity of the concept
- The accuracy of the measurements
- You’ll feel like a scientist upon first usage
Cons
- I wish the app were a bit more retro-looking in its layout. It could have used an old-school shutter dial
- Steep learning curve
- Shutter speed options to test are slightly limited. For example, 1/100 wasn’t available in the app at the time of testing. The fastest you can test is 1/500
Gear Used
- A PhotoPlug unit and USB-C cable, sent over by Filmomat
- My Samsung S24 Galaxy Ultra smartphone (on which the app was used)
- A Samsung S32 FE smartphone, which was used as a light source. I’d recommend using a torch instead
- Nikon F2 Photomic SLR
- Praktica MTL 3 SLR
- Minolta SRT 100 SLR
- Hasselblad 500cm
Who Should Buy the Photoplug?
Anyone with more than a couple of old film cameras, and anyone who wants to gift something unique to anyone with more than a couple of old film cameras.
Innovations
Pretty much the whole concept, as I don’t think anyone has made a shutter speed measurement solution like this that’s easily usable by even the most non-technical person.
What’s In The Box?
The main PhotoPlug unit looks like one of those 3.5mm audio jack converters you might have seen in your childhood. If you order these along with the PhotoPlug, you may also get a Lighting adapter (for older iPhones) or a USB-C cable adapter (for Android smartphones).
Ease of Use
Setting up the test environment correctly is absolutely essential to getting accurate measurements. You need to get a strong, non-flickering light source to place in front of your camera. This is very important to know, because a light source that flickers (even if it doesn’t to the naked eye) can ruin measurements. This light source should be placed in front of your film camera’s lens. You can even take the lens off if you’d like. Don’t forget to open the back of your SLR first, but before you do that, ensure there’s no unwound film inside the camera, or you’ll be cursing yourself.
Once you’ve opened the back, connect the PhotoPlug unit to your smartphone, and open the app you should have already downloaded. Place the open end of the PhotoPlug as close to your camera’s shutter as possible, without it touching. Set the shutter speed to the value you want to test accuracy for. The fastest you can measure is 1/500th of a second. Wind the advance lever of your SLR and then tap the aperture icon on the app. You’ll see that the lens has gone from white to red, indicating that the app is now ready to receive data from PhotoPlug. You only have 3 seconds to press the shutter button before the app stops accepting data. Within these 3 seconds, press the shutter button on the camera to open the shutter plane and expose PhotoPlug to the light from your light source. If you look at your smartphone now, you’ll see a graph that should look something like this.
If you hadn’t set up the whole thing correctly, you might see graphs that look like this one below.
Double Check Your Setup
I jumped the gun when I first set out to test PhotoPlug because I was too excited to see how it would perform. Increasing the brightness on my iPad to full, I placed it in front of the camera. I plugged in the USB-C cable to my smartphone and started testing out the app. Countless graphs that made no sense turned up one after another. No two measurements for the same shutter speed were even remotely close to each other. A quick search on the internet to try and figure out the issue didn’t help. And a whole hour later, I realised I hadn’t attached the PhotoPlug (insert facepalm emoji) into the adapter cable. It still wasn’t smooth sailing after I connected it though. I did a few more tests, which seemed way off the mark, and then shot off an email to Dr. Lukas with the graph screenshots. He then told me that the PhotoPlug wasn’t actually getting a proper light input, and the graph was just picking up noise (since the data is fed via the audio input on your phone). So I swapped out the iPad screen with a smartphone, but instead of using the screen as the light source, I turned on the Torch mode and placed it right next to the camera lens.
Voila! The readings now started to look so much more like they should have, had I been more careful at the start of this experiment. The information and readings that were coming through now were much closer to the shutter speeds that I was testing out on the camera. One additional thing to always take care of is to ensure the PhotoPlug is fully inserted all the way into either the 3.5mm port on your phone or the USB-C adapter cable. Otherwise, your readings will be messed up again.
It’s important to try and place the PhotoPlug sensor as close to the centre of the shutter plane. This was even more necessary when measuring shutter speeds on my Hasselblad 500cm, as when it was placed lower than centre, the readings were messed up
Features Of The App
The app itself is called Shutter-Speed and has a very minimalist look and feel. I really wish it looked more old school, like the LightMeter app, as I think this would add to the product’s appeal. The main screen of the app has two buttons—Camera Manager and Help. The former is what you need to go into first to add the model of camera that you will be testing the shutter speeds of. Once you’ve done this, come back to the main screen, connect PhotoPlug to your device, and ensure it’s placed right next to the shutter on the back of your camera. Turn the light source on and wind the advance lever. Tapping the centre of the screen will start the data input mode for the app and turn the white centre of the aperture red. Press the shutter to allow light to hit the PhotoPlug, and then you’ll see a graph appear on the screen.
A graph like this, with two distinct large peaks, indicates that you’ve got your reading correctly. The peaks are indicative of the start and stop of the light reading on PhotoPlug, which should correspond to the shutter opening and closing on your camera. By default, the value in the “deviation from” section always reads 1/1, so in order to get the actual deviation in terms of f-stops, you’ll need to tap the white box and select the shutter speed that your camera was set to when you pressed the shutter for this reading.
If for some reason the two red lines aren’t exactly aligned on the two biggest peaks, you can slide them individually until they are. You can also pinch in and out on the graph to zoom out and in respectively.
The above graph shows that my Minolta SRT 100 was slightly slower, about a third of a stop slower than the 1/15s it should have been. During my review I tested each shutter speed on the cameras at least twice, in order to ensure that my readings were consistent. Only when I noticed this did I click on the Save Data button. This allows you to save the reading under the camera you have chosen to write the information to. Once you’ve tested all available shutter speeds, you can go into Camera Manager and click on the camera name to see the readings chart, which should look like this.
Overall Thoughts
Given that most smartphones these days don’t have a 3.5mm audio port, you will probably need to order the USB-C adapter from Filomat along with the PhotoPlug. Still, the product with the cable is very affordable for a photography accessory of this kind. For someone like me who has a large collection of SLRs that need testing, PhotoPlug is an invaluable tool. I imagine it will also result in me ending up buying a couple more working vintage cameras at least. Upon using this tool, you’re bound to appreciate the efforts that were put in by the man behind the idea. Kudos to him for not making it a lot more expensive too. Once you’ve tested and retested the readings on your camera, you’ll understand what adjustments you ought to be making to your exposure readings at each shutter speed, to get a more accurately exposed film photo. Just remember that the first few minutes of using PhotoPlug might prove challenging, but you’ll totally enjoy the experience once you’ve nailed your setup.
PhotoPlug: The Smart Way to Test Shutter Speeds on Old Cameras
