Yashica Electro GX
If I were shipwrecked on a desert island and I could only have one camera it wouldn’t be the Yashica Electro 35GX. Why? I couldn’t bring myself to break it to use the lens to start a signal fire of course. Of all the fixed lens 35mm rangefinders this must be one of the best, I don’t know of one better. Every time I get negatives back from this camera I am pleased, the images are sharp and the way the lens renders the out of focus areas is smooth and delightful. I also like the 40mm focal length, it may be the Goldilocks between 35mm and 50mm. As an example of the sharpness of the lens and just how fine grained Kodak Ektar is here is a 100% crop from one of the images.
Scanned at 3200 DPI the resulting file is about the equivalent of a 13 mpixel digital capture. Not bad and films ability to preserve shadow and highlight detail in the same image still exceeds digital for now but that’s not really why I shoot film. It’s still all about the cameras for me and this one is great.
More images and information I have written about this camera can be found here Oct 2012 and here Cross Processed Velvia and Canon Ql17 vs Yashica Electro GX there are more so maybe using the search function on my blog is a better idea.