By Stephen Dowling
When the age of autofocus arrived, a new generation of plastic cameras came with it.
At first, compact camera designers kept to some of the constraints of the past. Many of the first successful designs in the autofocus compact market – like the original Canon Sure Shot and the Olympus AF-1 – stayed pretty rigidly to a traditional form: the rectangular camera.
As the 1980s progressed, compact cameras started to embrace more and more electronic advances such as auto exposure and motor-driven film advance. And as plastic construction became more advanced and the consumer market demanded smaller and lighter cameras, cameras started to change shape.
Simpler cameras without manual controls full of gears and cogs no longer needed big frames. And perhaps inspired by some of the quirkier designs of the past, camera designers decided that the rectangular brick was out, and rounder, curvier cameras were very much in.
Take a look at Canon’s own online Camera Museum and you can see this design philosophy start to accelerate through the hugely successful Sure Shot compact range. From the brick-like original Sure Shot and Canon MC, the Sure Shot range progressed to cameras like the rounded Sure Shot Ace and the sleek Snappy AF.
But even curvier cameras were to come.
The ‘Big Finder’ revolution
In the early 1990s Canon introduced another design that attempted to solve one of the ongoing issues with cameras small enough to pop in your pocket: super-small viewfinders. The growing global middle class being wooed by camera manufacturers included many older customers who had done away with their heavier old cameras but who struggled to compose pictures with tiny viewfinders.
The Canon Snappy LX of 1992 aimed to do something about that. The rounded black plastic body was built around an outsized viewfinder for the camera’s 35mm lens – a viewfinder three times bigger than some of the competition. In Japan, the camera was known as the BF35, the BF standing for – yep, you guessed it – “Big Finder”. The Snappy/BF35 was a fixed-focus model at beginners, but the design proved so novel that Canon decided to bring its outsized design into the ever-growing Sure Shot range.
Two years after the Snappy, the first version of the Canon Sure Shot AF-7 appeared. It offered an autofocus 35mm lens and outsized finder, with the larger-than-usual finder causing a noticeable hump in the top of the camera. The Owl was a relatively simple design – a Triplet-style lens and three-point autofocus – but its user-friendly features like that big, bold viewfinder ensured it was a huge success.
Other than the big finder, Canon added another useful tweak, moving the self-timer and flash controls to the front of the camera, so you could activate them without taking the camera from your eye.
In the world of camera design, a good idea rarely dies out entirely – it gets born again (and sometimes again). Another version of the Sure Shot AF-7 arrived in 1997, with a newly redesigned body that made the most of the camera’s outsized finder.
Dial it up
This edition of the camera did away with the flash/self-timer buttons on the front of the body in favour of a command dial, just like the ones that could be found on the consumer end of the Canon EOS SLR range. With this you could cycle through flash settings, set the self-timer, and turn the camera off (closing the lens cover at the same time.) It is a nice fat dial that cycles through each mode with a pleasing click. It’s this camera – the one this review will take you through – that’s the epitome of this well-thought-out design.
The Sure Shot AF-7 (or Prima AF-8, as it’s known in continental Europe) is a great example of the sort of camera I ignored for years – the kind of point-and-shoot compact churned out in mind-numbing quantities in the years before film’s almost-terminal decline.
Camera companies big and small took advantage of growing prosperity and offered compact cameras of varying levels of cost and sophistication – Canon’s vast Sure Shot range being one of the most comprehensive. It’s only in recent years (and partly through running my online camera shop Cameraburo) that I’ve gone from passing over these cheap and cheerful compacts like this and shooting with them instead.
It turns out the Sure Shot AF-7 – or “Owl”, as some versions of this camera were known by – is quite the hoot to shoot.
It’s a light, easy-to-use camera, and it’s about as intuitive and user-friendly as compact cameras get.
Almost every function on the camera – apart from activating the shutter – has been moved to the command dial on the front of the camera. Set to ‘Off”, the camera’s lens cover is closed. Move it to “Auto” and the lens cover is opened and the camera is ready for business. Cycling through the modes, you can then choose from flash on, flash off or the self-timer. The rewind button is about the only major feature that isn’t on the command dial, which makes sense – you don’t want to rewind the film halfway through shooting just ‘cos you turned the dial the wrong way.
The Sure Shot AF-7 is not a camera I’ll be clickbaiting with a “Contax T2 killer for £50” headline. This is a consumer compact built for a humble price point. The lens’s widest aperture is f/4.5, and the shutter speed spread is narrow – the slowest is 1/45th and the highest is only 1/180th. While the lens is sharp in the middle, there is noticeable distortion and fringing in the corners. This was a cheap camera aimed at amateurs and occasional photographers, and not specs-hungry enthusiasts. Affordability was always its primary concern.
The Sure Shot AF-7 tells you the auto-focus system is working with a single green light in the viewfinder; a steady green light tells you the camera’s flash is about to fire. Like most cheap compact cameras, the viewfinder doesn’t give you any focus feedback – you use it only to compose.
Another plus: the camera runs on a pair of AA batteries, which you could expect to pick up in any corner shop, souvenir store or kiosk from Tokyo to Timbuktu via Tashkent – no fruitless searches for an esoteric battery.
Cheap but cheerful
The camera’s simplicity pares down the possibilities. In sunny weather, the Sure Shot AF-7’s exposure system is almost always going to be shooting at narrow apertures. But that’s fine. This is a camera I’ve enjoyed using as a sunny-day snapper on walks around London, and not something that has to take prize-winning architectural shots one minute and bokeh-tastic portraits the next.
The Sure Shot AF-7 proves something that’s often forgotten as bloggers and YouTubers flock over more expensive must-have compact cameras; cheap and cheerful cameras have their place, too.
Canon Sure Shot AF-7 specifications
Lens: 34mm f/4.5, three elements
Shutter: 1/45 to 1/180
Focus: Three-step autofocus
Modes: Automatic, Flash-on, Flash-off, Self-timer
Batteries: Two x AA batteries
One crowning reason for the Sure Shot AF-7’s usability is that enormous viewfinder. It’s impressive enough three decades after the camera was released – it must have been quite the revelation when this camera first hit the shelves back in the 1990s. I’ve sold a number of Sure Shot AF-7s at Cameraburo pop-ups over the last few years and every time I introduce someone to that big, bright viewfinder for the first time, the reaction is the same. The Sure Shot AF-7’s viewfinder feels like watching the world on a movie screen instead of a television set. It’s especially impressive if you compare it to the viewfinder found on the Olympus Mju-II, which is this cult camera’s biggest drawback.
In some way, this camera is one of the auto-focus era’s closest equivalents to the legendary Olympus Trip 35. It’s not a camera weighed down with sophisticated features. It’s aimed at people who want to take pictures without getting bogged down in multiple modes and hours leafing through the manual. Anyone from eight to 80 could pick it up and be taking pictures with it in a few minutes.
When people ask me to recommend a compact film camera that won’t break the bank, the Sure Shot AF-7 is one of the cameras that springs to mind. Sometimes a camera is just easy and enjoyable to use. The Sure Shot AF-7’s huge finder makes composing shots a breeze, making this a great choice for anyone looking for a fuss-free compact for casual shooting.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
In another lifetime I was Cameras/Electronics Manager at my local Kmart. I wasn’t into photography then, and the cameras we sold were point and shoots by all the major makers. I hardly remember any of them (except for the obscene amount of Fuji Discoveries we’d take shipment of but rarely sell, as people wanted those “name” brands.) But I do remember the Owl, as it was the most expensive of the clamshell cameras, y’know, the ones that weren’t desirable enough to be kept locked up at all times. We definitely sold a bit of them, as they were that perfect balance of “cheap” (about $50 USD) but still good. Canon knew what they were doing.