I've always had a keen interest in all kinds of OEM cameras and have been searching tirelessly. The Asnco Autoset introduced today falls into this category, and its prototype is the First Auto exposure camera Minolta Hi-Matic side-axis machine introduced by the Japanese Minolta company in 1962.
Although produced in Japan, this Ansco Autoset was far more famous than the Minolta prototype that year, because in 1962, American astronaut John Glenn took this Ansco Autoset camera into space! John Glenn, though the third American to go into space, was the first to achieve orbiting the Earth. In 1962, he made three rounds of the ground.
Ansco's predecessor was E.& H.T. Anthony Co., a daguerreotype photographic gallery in New York, USA, founded by Edward Anthony in 1841 (said to be 1842), and subsequently developed into a supplier of photographic equipment in 1847.
In 1870, Ansco began manufacturing cameras, the first company in the world to have a patent for a film box that did not need to be installed in a darkroom. In 1902, Anthony Co. merged with Scovill & Adams to form Anthony & Scovill Corporation, abbrevially known as Ansco. That's where Ansco comes in.
In 1928, Anscogssi was acquired by the German company Agfa and the company name was changed to Agfa Ansco. But with the United States entering World War II, Agfa Ansco was placed under the control of the "Alien Property Custodian" in the United States. From 1943 onwards, its cameras began to be sold solely under the Ansco brand. Eventually, Agfa Ansco was sold under the guise of "enemy assets."
After the end of World War II, Ansco's camera production reached its peak, with an annual production of up to 2 million units! From the 1950s onwards, Ansco's main business line shifted to the sale of imported OEM cameras, including Agfa, Chinon, Ricoh, Minolta and many more.
When it comes to The Japanese Minolta Company, I believe that everyone will not be unfamiliar. The domestic Seagull DF series SLR camera is developed on the basis of imitating the Minolta company's SLR. Minolta was originally founded by Kazuo Tashima on November 11, 1928 in Osaka, Japan, and of course the name at the time was not Minolta, but Nichidoku Shashinki Shōten (Nippon-dop photo shop).
It was not until 1933 that the name Minolta was applied for and registered for use in camera products. The name Minolta, which is actually an acronym for "Mechanism, Instruments, Optics, and Lenses by Tashima," translates to the effect of Chinese to the effect of "machinery, instruments, optics, and lenses made by Tashima."
In 1937, Nichidoku Shashinki Shōten (Nippon-douli photo machine shop) was renamed Chiyoda Kōgaku Seikō K.K. (Chiyoda Optical Seiko Co., Ltd.). Although the name "Minolta" was registered for camera products as early as 1933, it was not until 1962 that the company's name was officially renamed Minolta. So in the early years, many Minolta cameras would see the words "Chiyoda Kōgaku", as shown in the following figure.
By 2003, Minolta had merged with another Japanese camera manufacturer, Konica, to form Konica Minolta. In 2006, Konica Minolta completely exited the camera industry, and the entire assets of its digital cameras were acquired by Sony Sony, and a world-famous camera brand came to its end...
As Minolta's first OEM machine with an auto exposure camera, the Ansco Auoset side-spindle machine has a selenium light meter built into it. The part inside the red box in the figure below is the electric eye of the light meter, and the advantage of selenium light metering is that it does not require a battery, but it is easy to age, especially in a long-term exposure to bright light. So many cameras that use selenium metering today have basically no accuracy to speak of, if they can still react.
After aligning the red arrow next to Auto on the camera's exposure adjustment ring with the white arrow below (Figure 1 below), the aperture selection under the lens is also exactly in the Auto file (Figure 2 below), at which point the machine's aperture and shutter speed are automatically set by the meter based on the metering results. The machine can also set the aperture manually, but the shutter is only 1/30th of a second.
From the above Figure 2, it is not difficult to see that the machine is equipped with a Japanese Citizen shutter. In addition to the shutter being automatically set by the metering device, there is also a B-gate available.
The Ansco Autoset is fitted with a Rokkor 45/2.8 lens, which is supposed to be a three-set five-piece structure. Although the lens only has Ansco's brand logo on the rim, I believe that as long as the same people who have used The Minolta camera know that Rokkor is definitely another "business card" of Minolta.
The information I saw said that the Minolta Hi-Matic was equipped with two lenses that year, which were 45/2.8 and 45/2. However, the Ansco Autoset I saw was equipped with 45/2.8 lenses, and it seems that there is still a difference between the prototype and the OEM!
To the left of the lens holder (when facing the lens) there is also a set of numbers from 20 to 340, which is the Flash Exposure Indexes when the camera uses the flash.
In order to obtain the correct exposure, the sensitivity of the film must be accurately set. The film sensitivity adjustment knob is in the upper right of the camera back (when the lens is forward), as shown in Figure 1 below. The metering results of the machine can be displayed as a pointer in the view window, as shown in Figure 3 below.
Although it was Minolta's first auto-exposure camera, the technical specifications of the Ansco Autoset, which was branded from the Minolta Hi-Matic side-axis camera, seems to be nothing worth explaining today, after all, it is a product from 60 years ago. However, the shutter button of the machine is very characteristic, that is, a boot (as shown in the following figure).
When I got this Ansco Autoset in my hand, I brought an original English instruction manual and outer packaging carton, which is relatively complete, and the gray skin of the machine is not very common, at least in my opinion.
This Autoset, produced by The Japanese company Minolta for Ansco OEM in the United States, I bought it from an American seller at eBay in December 2009. The price of the camera is only $0.99, plus 29.52 international shipping costs, the total arrival price is $30.51.
Author:Zhang Yi