supercamerapages2001

Panasonic C-525AF

Specifications

• 135 film; 24*36mm negatives
• 35mm f/3.5 lens, 3 elements in 3 groups
• viewfinder with framelines
• built-in automatic flash with override switch
• 4 steps active auto-focus
• powered by one CR123 3V lithium battery

About the camera

The Panasonic is a little plastic point-and-shoot camera very typical of its era. It is auto everything: auto exposure, auto advance and rewind, auto flash and auto focus.

It is small but thick (about 4.7cm at its thickest), making it feel kind of chubby. The viewfinder is quite small, typical for this category but it has framelines instead of the black borders so you can see outside the frame a little.

A good thing about this camera is its flash switch. It is a mechanical switch with three positions: auto, on and off. As it is mechanical, it remembers your last setting and it can be changed while the camera is turned off. A lot of later and better point-and-shoots had flash controls tied to a screen and a button which would forget the setting each time the camera is turned off. Some of them would be able to remember it thanks to a little battery (I am thinking about the Konica A4) but the mechanical switch solution just seems better. The auto mode is not very "flash happy", it does not trigger the flash at any occasion but really only when it gets dark. From experience I can say this is a bit rare on point-and-shoots. Most of them will fire the flash almost all the time, even in daylight.

As this camera has no screen, the frame counter is also mechanical but nothing special here.

Nothing special anywhere else really, this camera is basic and normal. Why did I get it then? I was at a used photo gear fair and after my main purchases I had 10€ left in my wallet. I figured I would use those to purchase some cheap cameras from the guys of www.collection-appareils.fr who had a stall there. For 10€ I got a broken Barbie camera and this little Panasonic. I like old Panasonic cameras as well as old Samsung ones. I find it quite amusing how these huge corporations were struggling to take a place in the camera market. So I find the cameras resulting from these attempts a bit touching (and this one's cute which adds to this effect!!).

Results

Nothing special but it does take pictures. Does it do it any good? Well it is average, the 35mm f/3.5 lens is a triplet and, more importantly, the autofocus system has only 4 steps. So it works okay in most situations but sometimes the focusing is a bit off, not because the autofocus missed but more likely because the chosen focusing step is too much of an approximation. Sharpness and detail rendition seems okay when the focusing is right. As expected from a wide-angle triplet, the lens vignettes and displays some softness and chromatic aberrations near the edges but that's to be expected and doesn't look too bad. The expired Agfacolor 200 could have used a bit more exposure. I should have hacked the DX code for that to happen but shoot! That would have required effort!

The photos were all shot in a big botanical garden in Paris where an exhibition of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures was installed. Apparently those are lit-up at night hence why they look like paper lanterns. Anyway I figured it would make for colorful silly pictures which would be quite appropriate for this camera and film combination.

Should you get this camera? Well if you need a basic point-and-shoot and you can get this for cheap (and by cheap I mean 10€ or less) then go for it. But don't seek this one model out. There are a bunch of other cameras able to do the same thing as this one so just get whatever finds your way (that's the whole theme of my camera collection right here).