Canon Sure Shot AF35ML

So here's another Sure Shot from the collection, but a more basic and more sought after one due to it's bright f/1.9 aperture lens.

This is a Canon Sure Shot AF35ML with a fairly nice--and fairly uncommon for this level of camera--40mm f/1.9 lens.  This was the second Sure Shot from Canon so that places it at about 1981 and the same vintage as cameras like the New F-1 and the T-series FD cameras.

I suppose this camera might be thought of as the spiritual sucessor to the Canonet line and something like the QL17 G-III...well, probably it'd be more correct to say something like the QL19, but whatever.

It's autofocus of course, and there's not really any settings that you can control other than the ASA, which only goes up to 400 on the earlier models, however, some later Taiwanese built models went up to 1000.   It's worth mentioning that the ASA 1000 models lack an 800 setting, and since the low-light autofocus isn't improved on these later models, I really question the usefulness of the higher speed setting. 

In the viewfinder you'll find reasonably bright frame lines in addition to little pictograms that light up to sort of let you know the approximate distance that the camera's focused on, and so far I've found it to be pretty accurate (maybe two shots per roll are misfocused, but some of that's surely operator error).

Exposure is generally good, focus is fairly fast, you can even shoot continuously at about 1 frame per second.  It has AF/AE lock as long as you hold the shutter button halfway, so you really do have pretty good control over the final result as long as you take a second to think about what you're doing.

Some comments on the internet say that this is a loud camera, and I'd somewhat have to disagree.  It's not really that much louder than most cameras with a motordrive of the era, and most SLRs aren't much quieter given the sound of the mirror slap.  I suppose if you're used to the near-silent clicking noises of most current digi-pocket cams it is a little loud, but if there's any other ambient noise it's not really that bad.  That said, there is one annoyance that I've found when shooting in low-light without the flash being popped up and that's the warning buzzer telling you that you should use the flash.

The lens is fairly sharp for a point and shoot's lens, but certainly consumerish in its rendering of out of focus areas.  It doesn't seem to flare too badly and does appear to be well coated.  There are filter threads (43mm if I remember right), and the metering cell is located within the lens barrel, so if you wanted to use filters, or maybe a polarizer the camera would automatically compensate exposure.

Here's an (not very good) example showing the out of focus areas:

Anyway, I like the ML a lot.  I think I'd easily say I like to use it more than my Canonet if for no other reason than I like that it uses AA batteries and not those expensive and awkward to use Wien Cells.  Having a built in flash is actually pretty nice as well.

And more examples: