Balda CA 35 (c. 1983)

Name: Balda CA 35
Brand: Balda

The Balda CA 35 is an ultra-compact 35mm viewfinder camera from the 1980s, made by the West German firm Balda of Bünde. It was sold under three names. The same body was the Voigtländer Vito C and the Revue 35XE, with no functional difference between them. That was typical of Balda's business model: the company built original and clone cameras meant to be white-labelled for resale by third-party brands. The Revue variant was sold through Foto-Quelle, then the largest camera retailer in Europe.

Balda squeezed a lot of camera into very little plastic. It weighs just 175g with film and batteries, and measures 4 × 2½ × 1 inches, nearly the smallest and lightest 35mm film camera on the planet. It's almost all plastic, but the build quality drew real praise from reviewers. One called it “hands-down the best plastic-shelled gadget I've ever used,” noting super-tight tolerances and a sturdy, almost luxurious feel. The details back that up: an etched grip, a thin but rigid single-stroke film winder, a bright orange shutter button with remote trigger grooves, and a rewind crank that doubles as the film door release when pulled up gently.

It's a zone-focus, automatic-exposure camera with minimal controls. You set the distance and ISO on the lens barrel by rotating tabs that one reviewer found “uncomfortably thin” and cumbersome. The camera handles the rest, calculating apertures up to f/16 with shutter speeds between 1 and 1/500th of a second. The lens is a 38mm f/2.8, marked Baldanon on this version (Revuenon on the Revue), and it's longer than most lenses on cameras this size. The viewfinder is big and bright, with focus icons displayed inside and a clear indication of the selected distance. A backlight compensation switch adds 1.5 stops and resets itself on the next frame.

35mmc called it “the easiest to use camera I've ever had or tried,” reporting that every shot fired with it came out sharp, well exposed, and in focus. The same review noted the focusing is smooth and nicely damped. Analog.Cafe (January 2021) was more measured on image quality. It found the lens reasonably sharp in the center in optimal light, with bokeh that sits between modern ultra-corrected lenses and the vintage swirling kind. It also saw slight chromatic aberration in bright light and a tendency toward coma distortions when shooting foliage against the sun. The metering skews toward overexposure. The reviewed copy had a light leak in the bottom-right corner.

A few practical quirks. The camera needs two LR-44 batteries; the matching CF 18 flash unit takes two AAs. The wrist strap is specialized. It slides into the body like a SIM card into a phone, and if you lose it, it can't be replaced. The reviewer paid just over $100 for their copy in 2021, a little more than they'd planned to spend.