Photography news, before it happens

Here are some observations by a reader (thanks Mistral75) on the “unprecedented” new Yashica camera that is rumored to launch on Kickstarter in October:

Having a second look at the various videos posted by Yashica on their YouTube channel, I realised that the rangefinder camera shown in the two first videos (‘YASHICA – Peep into our Coming Chapter‘ and ‘YASHICA – The Silence of Story‘, uploaded in August) is not the same as the one shown in the third video (‘YASHICA – The Prologue‘, uploaded eight days ago).

In the first two videos, it’s a Yashica Electro 35 GSN. How do I know? I downloaded the 4K videos from YouTube thanks to a piece of software, extracted the frames thanks to another one and cropped the pictures to show the camera only:

The camera shown in the latest video is different:

– the hot shoe is higher, thicker, with a hard stop wall on the front; it looks a bit rough
– the lever around the shutter release also looks a bit rough
– the Yashica name is on the top plate instead of the leatherette
– the window in the center is square instead of rectangular
– the lettering on the front of the lens is closer to the optical axis
– the inscription on the bottom right is much longer than “GSN”
– the camera might be a tad smaller.

Here are six different pictures of this mysterious camera. Unfortunately, their quality is quite poor. Remember, these are 640×480 100% crops of 3.840 x 2.178 frames extracted from a highly compressed and a bit blurry 4K video downloaded from YouTube:

Read More »