The Ansco 35 is a plastic camera made by Haking of Hong Kong, and is also branded as the Halina 35. It was manufactured around 1980 and mine says made in Macau on it. It is obviously a toy camera in that it has designs that are just for show and is all plastic.The specs are pretty typical of toy cameras of that era having a 45mm fixed focus lens (they call Ansconar and color corrected), settings for sun/clouds/flash. With a plastic lens that should come out to f8 for clouds and f11 for sun.

Sunny:

Cloudy:

The feel and usage of this camera is excellent. It has the faux leather grip that is not slippery and the size is big enough that you can shoot with one hand. The film advance is a thumb wheel below the shutter that also can be done without looking. The shutter to  me has a nice firmness that I don’t worry about bumping and releasing it, meaning I do advance it ahead of time and it’s ready to go – which is nice! The film counter isn’t my favorite being a recessed disc you need to reset, but that’s really the only drawback I give it.

The lens is very sharp in that 10 – 20 feet range:

The color and contrast are decent:

These go pretty cheap from what I’ve seen in that $10 USD range. They were meant to like like late 60’s rangefinders like the the Canon Canonet or even the Yashica Electro 35. The Halina 1000 is very similar to this one also. I recommend to get one and have it near for quick shots.

Al Mullen loiters around Darboy, Winsconsin shooting a whole range of interesting cameras. You can see his Flickr Photostream here