The 110 Mini-Explosion

In 1839, L. J. M. Daguerre succeeded in producing a detailed picture on a silvered copperplate using a camera the size of a breadbox. His subject had to remain motionless for an hour for a sufficient exposure. Just 139 years later, we have a whole new wave of Lilliputian 110 cameras that do just about everything but say cheese. The largest of the five 110s featured here is the 6.7-inch Vivitar 742XL; the smallest is the teeny-weeny Rollei A110 that's only 3.3 inches. For a real road test, however, we lent the five 110s to five professional photographers and asked them to shoot some photos and then give us their impressions of the cameras. We dug their subject matter and they dug the cameras. Less, definitely, is more.