The Minox 35ML

Minox was a company formed around a single product, Walter Zapp's ground breaking and iconic sub-miniature camera. By the middle of the 1970's, though, such dependency on a single product was neither fashionable nor economically defensible. The company began to look around for ways to broaden its base.

In doing so, the engineers at Minox could hardly fail to notice the success of  the Rollei 35. Introduced in 1966, Rollei's ultra miniature 35mm camera had re-written the rules for just how big a quality 35 had to be and, in the process, saved Rollei from the gaping jaws of bankruptcy.

Learning from the Opposition

The Rollei 35's success was a lesson not lost on Minox. What was clear, though, was that anything with the Minox name on it had to be even sleeker and more compact than Rollei's offering. The company turned to Professor Richard Fischer, an industrial design expert who was a specialist on the use of plastics in high precision machines. Looking around for ways to improve on the Rollei offering, Fischer revisited the discarded concept of the folding camera and realised something interesting.

Fischer's insight was that, the shorter the focal length, the less the distant from the film plane the lens needed to be. This might appear painfully obvious to many photographers but it was a point that seems to have been lost on virtually every camera designer up to that point. Fischer and the Minox team worked out that a camera with a 35mm focal length lens could be made to collapse into a package so small that it would hardly cause a bulge in a shirt pocket. Moreover, because the lens would be so close to the film in use, all that would be required to hold the lens in the working position would be a short, light tight tube rather than the bellows used in previous folding camera designs.

The 35EL

The first fruit of this concept was the introduction in 1976 of the Minox 35EL, an exquisite little machine built largely from glass-fibre embedded in Makrolon, a polycarbonate which had been developed by Bayer in the 'fifties. Although detractors were quick to mock Minox's 'plastic camera',  the quality of the results from the 35mm Minotar soon stopped the jokes, as did the hefty price tag attached to the little camera. Interestingly, just as Walter Zapp had contracted out production of the original Minox, production of the 35 series was entrusted to Balda, a company well known for solid, though not enthralling, mid-range cameras.

The 35EL was a run-away success from the beginning and, as they say, immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so perhaps no one was especially surprised when the Soviets introduced a brazen knock-off in the form of the Kiev 35A. Minox realised that they had a small but effective tiger by the tail and a steady stream of variants followed the initial camera.

Major Revisionism

The 35ML, introduced in 1986, represented a major revision of the design. Along with a new body shape, the electro-mechanical meter display of the previous models was dropped in favour of LEDs in the viewfinder.

The viewfinder itself was improved to counter persistent complaints about its small size in earlier versions, while a number of internal changes were made to improve reliability.

All in all, if you could live with the new shape of the camera, the ML was a worthwhile upgrade.

Five Steps to Heaven

All the Minox 35s are as simple to use as their sub-miniature brethren. With the camera set to fully automatic mode, there are only five steps to taking a picture:

A tiny 'snick' tells you the shot's been taken. Repeat as desired.

In Use

The 35ML is one of those cameras about which there's very little to write because it's an almost perfect, minimalist, picture taking machine. No, the lenses aren't the sharpest around but they're as sharp as most people need. No, it isn't the ideal camera for sports photography or pictures of insects but it is ideal for what most people want a pocket camera to do - take pictures on the fly with the minimum of fuss (but see the section on loading, below).

For those who really want it, there's a degree of manual intervention available in the form of manual aperture settings but this is rarely required in practice, the Minox's metering and programmed exposure combinations being well chosen for the camera's normal uses.

Caveats and Care

There are one or two things the user needs to be cautious about. The first is the front flap. Generally speaking it should open and close easily, dropping into place with a quiet snap. Make sure you don't force it, though, because the parts in a Minox 35 are small and, treated with disrespect, may well distort or even snap.

A more common source of problems is film loading. Inserting film in a Minox 35 can be something of an excercise in manual dexterity, as shown by the illustrations here, taken from the user manual.

First the back must be removed, then the pressure plate folded down. The film is then loaded, the pressure plate folded back up and the back slid on. Even then, the unwary user's problems aren't over.

The sprockets in a Minox 35 are much shallower than in most other cameras and can fail to engage the film, with consequences ranging from interesting to aaaarghhh!  The solution is to load the film and close the back, then gently turn the rewind knob clockwise until you feel resistance. Now fire and wind on twice, watching that rewind knob. If it turns smoothly with each wind, all is well. If not, some investigation is required.

Interestingly, Walter Zapp is reputed to have used a 35ML as his family snapshot camera, which is something of a seal of approval. One can only assume that a lot of people share his views, judging by how well Minox prices hold up, even in the age of the Digi-pocket camera.

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