This Saiga 35 TS is a frustrating camera to research. Entering “Saito Eng.” into a search engine and you get everything from a company that started in 1979 making model airplane engines to a character in a modern Anime story from Saiga, a small town in an industrial area in Japan. Enter “Saiga” and you get a semi-machine gun manufacturer.
A clue to this camera’s origins—at least in Canada—was found at the back of the instruction book. P.M.S.C. turns out to be a drug company formed 40-years ago by two pharmacists who now have 1500 employees. If part of that organization ran pharmacies they may have imported this camera. It is curious that the instruction book is printed in English if that was the case.
It seems we will have to stay with describing exactly what we have. We have a camera in a box in a neatly stitched case complete with instructions.
The camera is a curious mixture of fine details but rather tinny parts. You have a 45 mm f/3.5 “fully coated” lens with “newly designed” shutter with speeds of B, 25, 50, 100 and 300. The lens can focus, but there isn’t any rangefinder to help you, just a plain viewfinder (with close-up frame marks to correct for parallax).
Likewise there is an accessory shoe, but no hot-shoe connection. Curiously the rewind button is on the top deck which becomes semi-obvious as to why when you discover the entire back/bottom comes off when you have to change rolls.
This is a perfectly fine little camera—it just doesn’t impress you with the well built quality most Japanese cameras managed to provide.
Since it did come with a pretty nice instruction book, here it is.
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