(This is the image from the ebay listing. I want you to imagine me sitting at home refreshing my email for shipping updates like "pakige?")
I have a Kodak Star 275, which is a cheapo plastic point-and-shoot that my parents used at some point.
It successfully takes photos and I enjoy that it's entirely mechanical1, but I've kind of wanted an "upgrade", something slightly less... 90s thrift store bargain bin. I knew I wanted a camera that's
- still entirely mechanical: no electronics to break that would make it completely useless (that means manual wind and rewind, no autofocus)
- more or less a compact point-and-shoot (that means no zoom, fixed focus)
- no Numbers™ (miss me with that aperture/shutter speed shit)
- ...okay. some Numbers™ so I can use both ISO 200 or ISO 400 film reasonably
- a little less plastic (I'm p sure my current lens is plastic)
- cheap on ebay (yes I know about the Olympus XA1. no I'm not dropping 60$ on a toy I might lose interest in after two weeks)
So I ended up at the Kodak VR35 K300/K400/K500, which as far as I can tell are all identical. Who knows what the numbers mean. It's surprising that there aren't actually that many compact cameras of this sort, because from the 90s onward it was all about auto focus/auto advance/auto everything, and before the 80s it looks like the cheap point-and-shoots were mostly for smaller film formats which are now all obsolete. The 80s seem to be the right time window for a nice manual point-and-shoot that could be considered an upgrade from what I currently have.2
I'm still waiting on a colour 400 roll to be developed, which compared against my previous roll will give me an idea of what I might want to shoot on in the future. One day I might even graduate to something with gasp Numbers™...
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except for the flash, but it's broken anyway lol
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lmk if you know of any others that fit the bill, it's fun reading about old cameras