MiNT Camera‘s Rollei 35AF compact camera is now available to order – with the company confirming an all-black version is also being released.
The camera, an autofocus 35mm camera based on the iconic Rollei 35 camera first released in the 1960s, has was officially announced nearly two years ago but in development for much longer.
The Hong Kong camera company confirmed the release of black version of the camera for the first time in the run-up to the Rollei 35AF’s release.
Both the black and silver versions of the camera are now available to order via the Rollei 35AF website.
The website read: “In response to the demand for a real compact film camera designed for the modern era, here we present our answer. A project as important as this shall not be taken lightly. Countless sketches adorn the drawing board as old ideas are scattered and reimagined.
‘While the final product bears a striking resemblance to its predecessor, its capabilities have undergone a remarkable transformation. Allow us to proudly introduce to you – the Rollei 35AF.”
It continued: “As good as the good ‘ol Rollei 35 was, it carried a significant drawback, making it one of the most iconic, but complicated pieces of equipment in modern history – its manual zone focusing system.
“Now equipped with state-of-art Lidar technology that enables precise focusing from 70cm up to infinity, it eliminates the frustration of guessing the focus, only to find out that the distance was miscalculated after a trip to the darkroom.
“It is faster, more precise, and much more user-friendly.”
The site lists the silver version of the camera with a price tag of £762 and the black version costing £787.
The Rollei 35AF is the first 35mm camera launched by MiNT, best-known for their instant film cameras. Founder Gary Ho told Analog Forever earlier this year that the mint team had been working on the project for more than five years.
Its release comes only months after Ricoh Imaging launched the Pentax 17 half-frame camera, the first Pentax film camera in nearly 20 years.
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.
Thanks for your review – they look to be an exciting new couple of new cameras. One slightly strange thing though on the camera’s website – talking of ISO as a means of changing the sensor’s sensitivity … These are film cameras. So the ISO setting is for adjusting the camera’s metering system to match the film used, whether to match it to ‘box speed’, or deliberately alter the metering for under or over exposure adjustment, etc.
What I don’t like about Rollei 35 is its ergonomics, it’s really annoying.