Review
A first look at the Yashica EZ F521
A first look at the Yashica EZ F521 from Japan Exposures on Vimeo.
It’s small, light, bears a quality name and there is a lot of plastic involved: welcome to the Yashica EZ Digital F521, a camera released in Japan yesterday.
Don’t let the big name “fool you” though, this is an inexpensive digital camera that has more in common with a cellular phone camera (with a different form factor of course) than state-of-the-art digital, just like toy cameras using 120 film don’t do so to achieve high quality medium format. For this reason, the F521 has already been dubbed “Digital Holga” even before its release.
Limitations and shortcomings in your equipment can good for creativity and there are plenty of those present here. However, given the targeted audience and market segment it would be unfair to point them out as weaknesses on this quirky snapper. Shutter lag, dynamic range, limited configuration options and viewfinder accuracy (mainly parallax) to name just a few aspects. Nonetheless, there is enough potential to charm you anyway, if you like the idea of a toy camera. There does not seem an actual shutter rather than the exposures done by the sensor. Since the lens assembly is fixed onto the body from the front by several screws, there might be some hacking potential by replacing the lens with something else, if you are so inclined.
Please have a look at the brief video review containing further details and sample images with comments. More images can also be found on Flickr and a Flickr group dedicated to the F521 has also been set up.
An alternative, more detailed review can be found here.
The Yashica EZ Digital F521 is available to order in the Japan Exposures Web Shop, shipments are scheduled for next week.
This video is available as a podcast via iTunes.
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October 31st, 2009 at 8:41
That might actually be a good donor to hack into a digital module for a Leica M camera. Seems there are not too many buttons involved and there is no shutter connected to the circuitry. Would probably only allow for shutter speed like 1/30th or slower to expose the whole sensor, but that could be manageable! Guess I will get me one and see what I can hack it into
October 31st, 2009 at 8:50
That type of distortion is called the Lartigue effect. It’s named after Jaques-Henri Lartigue who was a photographer that used a vertical shutter moving slit camera. He used this to great effect to take pictures of race cars and things like that and give them a sense of movement.
October 31st, 2009 at 22:53
Keep in mind that when adopting lenses, you will end up with significantly different field of view courtesy of the smaller sensor. While the “equivalent” focal length on this thing is ~43mm the actual focal length is 7mm. So, mounting say my 50mm Summar on this thing, I’d end up with a rather long telephoto lens — and the high pixel density from the small sensor would probably not show the lest in its best light.
Still, could be fun to experiment with!
November 26th, 2009 at 3:37
RE: “That type of distortion is called the Lartigue effect. It’s named after Jaques-Henri Lartigue who was a photographer that used a vertical shutter moving slit camera. He used this to great effect to take pictures of race cars and things like that and give them a sense of movement.”
The issue is that it’s got a CMOS imager with a ‘rolling shutter’. See for instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter