Wallace Koopmans Artlog

The lens of the Yashica Micro Finess is a 33mm f3.5 triplet nothing fancy just functional.  The first triplet lenses date all the way back to 1893 and are considered the simplest lens that can correct most aberations.    I haven’t been able to find much other information about this camera.  One magazine from the time suggested that it had similar specifications to the T4 although with the Triplet lens rather than the Zeiss Tessar of the T4. This does seem plausible when you consider that it can accommodate film DX coding from 50-3200 which was unusual for an inexpensive camera at that time.  Whatever it might borrow from Yashica’s parts bin it is ultimately a middle of the road camera with a middle of the road wide-angle lens.  As is often the case I used severely expired Kodak 400 in this camera.

The APS film format was short lived thankfully so despite the often inventive designs of some of the cameras there are just as many boring offerings.  The Minolta Vectis 10 is one of these.  It has a 25-50mm f4.8-9.1 lens and what must be one of the most limiting shutter speed ranges of 1/90 sec to 1/200 sec.  Even though it uses the smaller APS film format the camera itself is as large or larger than many contemporary 35mm film cameras.  It’s around the same size as the Yashica T4 zoom for example.  I would describe it as being chunky.  The viewfinder is a tiny little thing that’s easy to miss when bringing the camera up to your eye.  Without many redeeming qualities and with better camera options to use the dwindling supply of APS film in the Minolta Vectis 10 is not worth bothering with.

Some images from a camera that has always served me well.  While it is a sturdy enough camera the thing that hampers the X700 from being one of the great manual focus SLR’s of all time is its use of a plastic body.  At the time the Canon New F1, the Nikon F3 and the Pentax LX were made of sturdy metals the X700 felt cheap and I guess that’s why it was comparatively affordable.  The use of plastic aside the exposure system and functionality were top notch.  The top shutter speed of 1/1000  is also somewhat limiting although not an uncommon top speed for SLRs of the time.