Another review that almost never happened. I sold a few cameras as a job lot and the buyer asked to reduced the price. I agreed, as long as I could take out one camera. I took out this one, I wish I had taken out the XP12, but there you go.

Actually, asking for this one surprised even me as I thought I had already tried it. In the end, it turned out to be the Chinon 35F-M I had used before and got them confused. I think I picked this out purely on the name Chinon as I have grown to love them lately.

This model was introduced in 1978 and has a 38mm f2.8 Chinonex Color lens. The shutter speeds range from 1/60 to 1/250 with the choice being powered by a mercury cell, I used an LR44. The flash is powered by 2 AA batteries.

The aperture chosen can be seen on a needle scale in the viewfinder, as can the focus choice. Around the lens is zone focus selector.

My example was not in a great condition. The winder was a bit stiff and that connected to another issue. The winder cocked the shutter, but did not lock the advance. So you could wind on again even if you hadn’t taken a shot. If you forgot to take a shot and wound on, you would lose a shot. I did that once and used the film rewind to slightly retract the film. In the end I had so little faith in the film advance mechanism that I stopped taking photos quite quickly. I chose to transferred the film to another camera rather than waste it.

One thing I did notice, after taking out the film and playing with the winder, if it was the missed shot wind…the lever would not retract by the spring, you had to push it. That would be useful to know if I tried the camera again.

Here are the 4 shots I took, which actually did come out. I didn’t bother dehairing them though.

Not a great camera, my poor example didn’t help my opinion. I have other cameras I prefer more for instance the Pentax PC35 AF, though the Chinon is much cheaper. I might take this one apart just for fun, I like fiddling.