5 Frames with a Pentax Pino 35 and Kentmere 400

I think this camera came to my attention as I was browsing through various blogs and reviews about cheap take-anywhere point & shoot types. My own journey down that road had already taken in a box of very cheap assorted plastic models, bought to leave lying around at my daughter’s wedding, which gave mixed results, a few of the later members of the Olympus Trip family, and some from the infamous Soviet world of simple cameras, which probably scored the worst on reliability. The Olympus cameras (a Trip MD2, a Trip 601 and the very similar Trip 505) all did well on image quality, but the auto-load, wind & rewind never filled me with confidence, and the motor noise can be a bit of a giveaway if you are trying to capture something without being noticed.

I decided to look for something cheap to buy and simple to use, but not necessarily as simple as some of the fixed-focus fixed-exposure wedding cameras. I was happy to do without anything relying on batteries, apart from flash, and wanted something which produced good images but didn’t fall apart after one film. Easy eh?

So say hello to the Pentax Pino 35. This was the first in a series of inexpensive point & shoot cameras they produced in the 80s under the Pino brand, with some of the later models having the auto-drive I wanted to avoid. This one has a fixed shutter speed of 1/125, and once you have set the film speed to 100, 200, or 400, all you have to do is change the aperture by choosing a weather symbol – sun, light cloud, heavy cloud. According to the manual the resulting apertures range from f/3.8 to f/19. The lens is a 3-element, 3 group, 38mm, and with no focusing involved it claims to have everything from 1.5m to infinity in focus. As far as batteries go, it can work without them, but 2xAA will power the flash, (switched on with a small slider if you need it) and will also give you a low light warning in the viewfinder, handy if you leave the lens cap on. On the subject of flash, when you are using it the aperture selector works on subject distance rather than weather symbol, so the further away the subject, the wider the aperture.

And that’s about as complicated as it gets – set the film speed, set the weather, click & wind on.

As for the results, I am pretty pleased with them. I took mine on a walk to see some abandoned boats on the salt marshes of North Norfolk, and the images compare quite favourably with some I took at the same place the following day with my trusty Olympus OM-1.

I think I may finally have found the ideal camera to throw in a bag or a coat pocket when something bigger or more valuable might not be a wise choice. I paid not much more than £20 for mine, and I have seen them go for less. A few weeks ago my son asked if I could lend him a camera for his holiday, and I decided this was the one. But would I ever see it again? Would it survive in his hands? So of course I bought another one…

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