Minolta Autopak 800
Robust. Well-built. Complex design and yet super simple to use. Excellent lens. Parallax corrected rangefinder. Spring-driven motorized film advanced...
This sounding like your kind of camera? It should, the Minolta Autopak 800 has a lot of good stuff going for it. Until, that is, you get to the part about it using 126 film and the halo dims a bit. Not that 126 film is bad or anything, it is mostly just a dead format. Sure, there are DIY methods out there for adapting 35mm to 126 - you can still dig up expired 126 film on eBay - it is sad to say that this format and this excellent camera are not nearly as viable as decades past.
It really is a shame, because the Autopak 800 could make the claim for being one of the best 126 cameras ever made. As noted above, it is solid, well thought out, and well built. Focusing is done via rangefinder and the view corrects for parallax as you focus closer. The camera uses a CdS meter to gauge light and automatically decides if a burst from the flashcube is needed or not. This was quite the innovation of the time, as it meant you could leave the flashcube attached to the camera all the time and you could trust that it would only fire when needed. Minolta even added a manual override for triggering the flash in backlit or fill-flash scenarios! The Autopak 800 has two shutter speeds: 1/45th, when the camera is using flash, and 1/90th, when it is not. Niftily enough, aperture adjustment is set by the camera's meter when using the non-flash 1/90th speed and is set by the rangefinder distance setting when in flash mode.
Oh, and don't forget that wind-up film advance drive. Crank it up all the way and it is good for zipping through your next twelve frames of film. Clockwork cameras like this always catch our fancy.
za/sd
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