Ansco’s cameras once not only competed directly with Kodak’s, but they were made in Binghamton, New York. Most of them, anyway; some were made in Germany due to their longtime partnership with Agfa. But times changed, and in the 1960s Ansco began partnering with Japanese firms to provide more advanced cameras. Ansco started to lose its way as the 1960s faded into the 1970s (and the company rebranded its cameras as GAF, to match the parent company, General Aniline and Film). In 1978 GAF sold the Ansco name to Hong Kong camera maker Haking, which began affixing the Ansco name to many of its cameras for export to North America. The 1985 Ansco 600 Flash for 110 film is one of those cameras.
The Ansco 600 Flash is a rebadged Haking Flashmatic 110, also known as the Halina Flashmatic 110. Haking made cameras using all three brands. Some sources say this camera was made in Taiwan; others claim Hong Kong.
The camera is fully mechanical, using a simple leaf shutter said to operate at 1/125 sec. Its fixed-focus lens is said to be 27mm at f/8. These specs make it a good sunny-day camera.
If you like classic film-cartridge point-and-shoot cameras like this, check out my reviews of the Keystone XR308 (here), the Minolta Autopak 470 (here), the Kodak Instamatic X-15 (here), and the Imperial Magimatic X-50 (here). Or check out all of my camera reviews here.
I wanted to shoot fresh Lomography Color Tiger film, but none was available. Accordingly, I turned to eBay and bought a roll of Kodak Kodacolor Gold 200 expired sine October of 1991. The scans came back dim with muted colors. Photoshop and the Radiant Photo plugin helped these images a lot, but fresh film would still have shown this camera’s capabilities a lot better.
I shot all 24 exposures on springtime walks near my home. The 600 was an easy companion, fitting snugly into my back jeans pocket. It is about as simple as they come: aim, press the shutter button, wind. The controls feel surprisingly sure under use, making the 600 pleasant to shoot. The shutter fires with a clean, quiet click, and the winder is smooth and easy.
This lens is decently sharp all the way out to the corners, with no perceivable vignetting. I don’t see any distortion in these images, either.
I couldn’t test the flash on my 600 as it wouldn’t fire up after inserting fresh batteries. That doesn’t matter to me as I’m an available-light shooter, but in a review it’s good to test the flash to see how it performs.
The 600’s major bummer is its tiny, cramped viewfinder. It sees less than what the lens sees, and thanks to parallax, shifts subjects off center. This giant sign filled the viewfinder when I made the image.
It’s true even with subjects that don’t fill the frame.
Also, the 600 needs plenty of light to return well-exposed images. I made this image in a shadowy area on a cloudy day. The long-expired film didn’t help matters.
But in bright sun, when perfect framing doesn’t matter, the 600 delivers just fine. When it was new, it was a fine low-cost camera for the family snapshooter.
To see more from this camera, check out my Ansco 600 Flash gallery.
This camera was donated to the Jim Grey Home for Wayward Cameras by a longtime colleague who gave me all of her dad’s cameras after he passed. This and the Kodak Brownie Starlet I reviewed earlier were the least of them, and both were good enough cameras to capture family memories.
If you like old film cameras, check out all of my reviews here!
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