Yashica T4 Super

This autofocus jewel has a stunning Carl Zeiss Tessar, 35mm, f/3.5 that makes your pictures glorious feats of photography. It’s not super vintage or super Lomo, but it’s small and light, and has a superscope which allows you to “shoot from the hip!”

One day, I came home to my room and found a box on my desk. My mom had found some Yashica box in the attic when she was cleaning it out. I was pretty stoked cause the outside looked like it was some sick vintage camera so I was bummed out to find it was just a point and shoot. But slowly, as I did research, it became apparent that this camera was spectacular. For starters, these go out on ebay for like $100 and I got mine for free (it seems it was a gift that my family
had gotten). Secondly, the lens is a Tessar. As soon as I saw that, I was hooked. Looking more at the camera, it also has a superscope, which is like a TLR waist finder, but no focusing on it. It is PERFECT.

This camera is GREAT to use. It feels surprisingly light in your hand for the gem of a lens that it holds, but no mistake, the slightly bulky plastic body is pro in it of itself. My version is a weatherproof one. That doesn’t mean I can take it deep sea diving, but it’s great for humidity so (dare I say it?) it will be protected in your pants pocket. So for features, starting off with when we load the camera, are completely user-friendly. The film is auto-load/auto-advance, so there’s no worrying about this. Operation is quick and easy. There’s a small slider that takes the lens out from under its cover and turns on the camera. You then have a choice of two viewfinders: the normal one, and the mentioned superscope for “from-the-waist” shots. With just a press of the comfortably large shutter button, the camera whurrs and focuses to get you a great shot. The crosshairs for both the viewfinder and the superscope are dead on. There is a self timer for portraits, but
another great part of this camera is the flash. You can have auto, always, redeye, never, and landscape. The flash isn’t great for large shots, but works wonderful as a fill flash. It’s a great little workhorse that I can bring along.

So the shots here are some x-pro, which the Tessar handles wonderfully. The slow film I used gave me wide apertures which gave blown out highlights and foregrounds, with dark vignetted corners. The black and white, which I’ve developed (and some printed) myself, is great. For the ones I printed, I didn’t need to use contrast filters, the lens was so contrasty already! Color (of an abandoned fair ground) works great with this too. There’s no super-saturation with this lens, the color is totally real. Enjoy!

written by joeljaik on 2009-03-22 #gear #people #super #yashica #black-and-white #review #t4 #x-pro #carl-zeiss #tessar