#a35f

What we have here is the end of an era. The Canon A35F was the last Canon rangefinder. A legacy that had gone on for decades ended with this model. Soon after, they would release their first point and shoot, known as the Sure Shot, Autoboy or AF35 (for maximum consumer confusion) depending on where you lived. As consumers would go on to embrace auto-focus point and shoots, the humble rangefinder would soon disappear, until hipster weirdos rediscovered them and how fun they are.

In spite of knowing that they had a revolution coming down the pipes, the fine folks at Canon didn’t exactly phone in the A35F. They could have, it was a bit of a stop-gap model in the grand scheme of things, but instead they took their old rangefinder body and did something interesting, they put a flash in there. Hence the big F on the front of it.

This sounds simple, and it probably could have been if it wasn’t Canon, who decided that the best way to put a flash in a rangefinder was to repackage the whole thing around it. This might look like a black Canonet 28, but they had to completely redo the inside of the camera in order to put a pop-up flash in there. They had to design a new film winder that didn’t move when the film advanced and tucked out of the way so it didn’t block the flash popping up. The light meter shows you the aperture rather than shutter speed, since flashes typically use the same shutter speed most of the time. The film door is shorter because it can’t wrap around the side - that would expose the flash and battery compartment - and it doesn’t open by pulling up the winder like in the older model likely due to the way the hinge is packaged. Everything here is packaged around the flash. It is extremely proud of the flash - look at that big yellow F - and very concerned with hiding it away. It’s as though Canon engineers wanted you to know they didn’t half-ass this by just gluing a flash to the top of the camera and calling it a day, this wasn’t a mere stop-gap but a product that required some real engineering and packaging skill.

Yet if you’re used to a Canonet 28, you’re right at home. Everything is roughly in the same place, it still uses the same awful battery - though it requires an additional battery solely to fire the flash - and basic operation is roughly identical. Mine has the fun quirk of having a slightly misaligned rangefinder, which makes it a bit more difficult to use, but that’s not so much a design flaw as it is a reality of a camera that probably had a few bumps along the line over its 35 years in existence. It does feel cheaper than the older model, more plastic and less metal. The new compact film winder is slightly less comfortable to use, the small knob not being especially great to grip. It does still feel special though, and at the time Canon was very good at making their cameras feel special.

For film I used a roll of Lucky SHD 100, a black and white film from China. I don’t actually like Lucky film very much, having used it a couple times before and never being a particularly big fan of the results. It has fans - I bought it because someone on the internet was a Lucky superfan who said it was the only thing he ever shot - though I was not among them. But I still have some and I didn’t want to waste it, so in it went.

I discovered something about the Lucky film I didn't realize because this is the first time I had to scan it: there are no edge markings. This is a problem for one very important reason, you need those so you can tell how to load the film into the scanner. It's easy to fix when the image is mirrored, but I shouldn't have to do that, because I should be able to just load it in using the edge markings as a guide. It also seems to be surprisingly fragile. It is very cheap film and while it's going to show up here exactly one more time, I am going to use that last roll in what I feel is an appropriate place.

My issues with Lucky aside, the result was about what you would expect from a Canon rangefinder - very good. In spite of the imperfect rangefinder, it was still easy to focus with, which is the important thing. Images were sharp, nicely exposed and of a high standard of quality. Canon know what they’re doing, and the A35F is an example of that, it just takes good pictures, even with film I don’t necessarily like. I might complain that it feels cheaper than the earlier Canonet, but it’s still doing the fundamentals right, and they clearly didn’t cut costs on the most important part, the lens.

Next up, fooling around with a merely okay point and shoot.