PhotoReflex

Harvard and Yale students and local "townies" had fun last year photographing themselves in a new device called the PhotoReflex. Last week the same fun reached a wider public. The device was shown and operated in G. Fox & Co.'s department store in Hartford, Conn., and at Wanamaker's in Manhattan.

The device consists essentially of a fast camera hidden behind a mirror. The mirror contains a hole. After the subject has leisurely arranged his pose, clothes and face the way he wants to have them (reflecting mirrors help him pose for profile and half-profile views) he presses an electric button. The front mirror drops; the hole flashes past the camera lens; the pose registers on the film. An attendant sends the films to New Haven for developing, retouching and printing on cabinet size pictures. Cost of one dozen PhotoReflex prints is considerably under standard studio rates. Greater is the ad vantage of the subject's being able to see how he or she is looking, without the embarrassment of some one else looking on. Animals and children are "natural" before the unseen camera.*

All PhotoReflex films go to New Haven because there is where the inventor works, amiable young Luther George Simjian, Armenian-born director of Yale Medical School's photographic laboratories. An other of his devices is a fogged silver screen for the perfect projection of microscopic slides. Newly formed to exploit his latest invention is PhotoRerlex Co. of America, affiliated with Sperry Gyroscope Co. and North American Aviation Corp. Soon he hopes to enjoy royalties from a national chain of PhotoReflex booths.

*The Photomaton, another self-photographing machine, seems to have lost popularity. The customer must turn and change face quite briskly to get different poses while the camera shutter flicks eight times. President is Major General Robert Courtney Davis (retired), onetime Adjutant General of the U. S. Army. Last October Photomaton Inc. and its operating company went into receivership. Whereabouts and activities of Anatol Josepho, Russian-born inventor, who reputedly received $1,000,000 for the Photomaton idea, last week were unknown to company officials.

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