Hit Miniature Camera

One of my earliest objects of longing was a Hit miniature camera.  At the grocery store near my house growing up, there was a gumball machine with the Hit proffered as the best possible prize.  Needless to say that I never won it.  The same camera also showed up in comic book advertising as a prize for selling True Grit magazine subscriptions or other detritus.  Never earned enough points to win one...

It sounded so cool - a real miniature camera that took real pictures.  The compactness made it ideal for a child... or a spy... or a spy with childlike hands, I guess.  But the main thing that I didn't understand as a kid is where one would get the pictures developed, or where the film came from.  I didn't remember seeing teeny boxes of film at the drug store.

Clearly you can see that as I child I tended to overthink things.

Imagine my thrill when I recently scored the camera at a thrift store for 50 cents - twice what some lucky bastard paid to get it out of the gumball machine 30 years ago.  Poking around on the internet, I see that Hit cameras aren't quite as exotic or rare as I thought.  It seems to be pretty easy to pick one up on Ebay for as little as $10.  Perhaps the bottom fell out of the miniature camera market when espionage went digital.

I think that the film is just 16mm motion picture film rolled with a paper backing, but I doubt that anyone but the most ardent hobbyist is going to use this for actual photography today.  Unless you're a spy on a budget, that is...

Nice web page featuring a photo taken with the Hit