Ansco Memo (1928)

The Ansco Memo was a single frame (what nowadays is called a half-frame) 35 mm camera made in Binghampton, New York. It was one of the first American-made 35 mm cameras.

Front

Back

Inside of Back

The body on my camera is wood with leather covering. Other versions of the Memo were polished wood and there was a Boy Scout version in khaki paint. The lens is a fixed focus f/6.3 Wollensak Velostigmat lens in a self-setting shutter. It wasn't marked with a focal length. Aperture settings were marked f/6.3, 8, 11 and 16. Shutter speeds were 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, B (bulb) and T (time). There wasn't any provision for a cable release. The film load was a strip of perforated 35 mm film, the same film used in a motion picture camera, in a metal container. The film would be threaded into an identical take-up container, and advanced by moving a slide on the back of the camera. The slide had two claws that engaged the perforations on the film, the same way film was advanced in a motion picture camera. This system was used in the later Agfa Memo in 1939. The exposure counter had to be manually reset after loading film and counted up to 50. It was actuated by the shutter, not by the film advance mechanism.

The Memo came in versions with a fixed focus f/6.3 lens, a focusing f/6.3 lens or a focusing f/3.5 lens. Ansco also sold a film strip projector, an enlarger and other gadgets for the Memo. Production ended during the Depression. The price of a Memo was about $25, or roughly $400 in today's depreciated dollars.