The Spartus Box 120 is just one in a series of no-frills box cameras introduced by Spartus in the early 1940s (not to be confused with the similarly named but clearly different Spartus 120 of the 1950s). Designed to accommodate 116, 120, 616, or 620 roll films, these models are virtually identical outside of the designated film format and faceplate design.
The Spartus 120 is a simple box camera made of an early type of plastic called Bakelite. At the time of the 120’s introduction, a great multitude of relatively inexpensive cameras (including the Spartus 35F) were being manufactured in Chicago by the same factories but sold under a puzzlingly broad range of different but related brands with Spartus being the cornerstone of it all. It should come as no surprise then that this very same camera was also sold as the Sunbeam 120 and that a brown-colored but otherwise identical variant was sold under the name “Spartus 120 Flash Camera.”
