Ansco Autoset (c. 1960–1961)

The Ansco Autoset is a 35mm rangefinder camera that Ansco of Binghamton, New York sold as its own. Underneath, it's a Minolta Hi-Matic, built for Ansco by Minolta and rebadged. Ansco handled several Minoltas this way, including the Uniomat range sold as the Anscoset. The Autoset was their version of the first Hi-Matic. The manual is blunt about what the camera was for: it "removes the guesswork from photography," setting lens opening and shutter speed automatically for the film and light on hand, with manual aperture and flash modes as fallbacks. The viewfinder is a coupled rangefinder type with a diamond-shaped focusing spot and automatic parallax correction. A needle in the finder tells you whether there's enough light to shoot, and a red zone means reach for flash. The lens is a four-element coated Rokkor, f/2.8, focusing from three feet to infinity, with shutter speeds from 1/30 to 1/800 second in automatic operation. Flash sync is fixed at 1/30 for lamps and electronic flash alike. The exposure control ring is interlocked, so it can only be turned after the film is advanced. Loading is standard 35mm in 12, 20, or 36 exposures.

For a rebadged consumer camera, this one has a big place in history. On February 20, 1962, John Glenn carried an Ansco Autoset aboard Friendship 7 and used it to take the first human-captured color still photographs of Earth from orbit. The manual's back page makes the pitch directly. It notes the flown camera was modified only to fit a gloved hand and a space helmet, with lens, shutter, and exposure mechanism identical to the one in the box. Accounts differ on how the camera got there. Air & Space Smithsonian reports Glenn purchased it at a drug store, and PetaPixel describes a "$40 drugstore camera," while other listings put the retail price nearer $89.95. The price is unsettled. The camera was evaluated for wider astronaut use, but the operating challenges in space kept it from becoming standard gear.

A later GAF Ansco Autoset CdS variant arrived in 1964 with updated metering. Most sources blur the two together, so specs attributed to one should be read with care. The base camera's film-speed range, aperture range, weight, and battery details aren't documented in the material we have.