Compact P&S of the 80's?

[Archiver]

I'm wondering what compact and semi-compact P&S cameras were available in the 80's. It's a kind of retroactive thought experiment in which I think of what gear I could have carried everywhere at that time.

My camera in the early and mid 80's was a Kodak disc camera. Quite small and able to fit into a jacket pocket, it did more or less what I wanted, albeit with reduced frame size.

The Olympus XA series were going well during the 80's, too.

Dad bought a Nikon L35AF 2 in the late 80's, and we still have it. The original L35AF was released in 1983.

What other good quality P&S cameras were around in the 80's? Perhaps with the possibilities of manual focus and turning off automatic flash?

 

[Greyscale]

Manual focus would make it not a point and shoot, that would fit more into the compact rangefinder genre. But there were a lot of great autofocus cameras introduced in the 80's and earlier, starting with the groundbreaking Konica C35AF in 1977. The Minolta Hi-Matic AF and AF2 were other early entries, as was the Nikon that you mentioned. Canon introduced its venerable Sure Shot/Autoboy line in 1979, and the Canon ML (Super Sure Shot) of 1981 is still highly desirable, and regarded as one of the true classics of its generation.

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

There were a lot more than you'd think as Photokina in 1982 or '83 featured several demo's.

For P&S's with primes or zoom I'll add these; Canon T80 (really a SLR but not what most people would call an SLR despite a very sensible design); Konica A4; Minolta AF-S and AF-S Zoom 90; Olympus AF-1, AF-i mini and AZ-300 Superzoom (an early bridge camera) and the Pentax ESPIO 120 (but that could be a typo' in my notes) and the Pentax Zoom 90.

There's lots more because Honeywell's AF system was used once available and I vaguely remember copied. Trying to get the date of introduction for many camras is difficult. I like prime sources but often have to rely on things like the copyright date on the instructions or the sales leaflet but a few miss that off.

BTW, a lot of them had ASPH lenses in then and faster lenses that we are used to nowadays. (Edit: this was a mistake "Canon's f/1.7 is a case in point" as the P&S I was thinking of is F/1.9 and scale focussing... ) And, BTW 2, most of them are large P&S's but the Olympus AF-1 mini is compact as we know it and a nice performer too.

Regards, David