The purchase
At the end of july this year I placed the winning bid on a Yashica J-7 with the lens Yashinon DX 50mm/1.7. The price I paid was about $22 (145 swedish kronor). My copy is in good condition, works perfectly and nothing seems broken. There's not a lot of information of this camera on the Internet and I thought this review needs to be written.
The camera
Yashica J-7 is a slim SLR with M42-mount. It's an early camera in the Yashica SLR line-up, 1968. The M42 screwmount ofcourse means you can use a great number of lenses. However my copy came with a Yashinon DX 50mm/1.7 lens, and as I believe this to be the standard lens on the camera I will treat it as a kit in this review.
Film: J-7 takes 135 film (35mm standard), with ASA 12 to 800. In my tests I have so far only used film with 400 ASA, on Kodak Tri-X and one cheap Kodak.
Shutter: Rubberized focal plane curtain with speeds from 1 sec to 1/1000 sec and Bulb. Like so many old SLRs it has a selftimer at the front to the left of the lens. Turning the shutter control dial affects the lightmeter scale (see below).
Lightmeter: CdS lightmeter. It's not trough-the-lens and has it's own little mini-lens, which you need to keep your fingers away from when metering the light!
Set your ASA and shutter speed, meter the light with the black button on cameras backside, and the meter needle will show you the correct f-stop to use.
Batteries: The lightmeter of the J-7 need PX625 mercury-batteries to function, like many of the old Yashicas (for example the rangefinder Minister D uses the same battery). It's discontinued, but I can easily get replacements in a swedish office store and they seem to work fine. The battery compartment is, as you can see, on the bottom of the camera, together with the film rewind release button and tripod socket. I used a coin to unscrew the lock on the battery compartment.
The batteries can be checked with a special button together with the lightmeter. Press the little white button marked "Batt.Check" and the light meter needle should point to the blue marking on the scale.
Lens: The Yashinon DX 50mm/1.7 that came with the camera is a reasonably fast and quite sharp normal lens. A funny thing is that it's actually radioactive. 6 elements in 5 groups, f1.7-f16. Thanks to Matt's Classic Cameras review I know about the auto-feature, wich can handle the aperture stopping down when shutter release is pressed half way! Super, can't wait to try that feature out... and can't believe I missed it first time around, this makes the camera kit even more great. Still, if going fully manual (say, use the lens on a Digital SLR) you can use the auto-manual switch to open and close the aperture while focusing.
Quirk: It doesn't have a hotshoe for lightning and accessories. I've read that your supposed to be able to mount something on the viewfinder instead. It doesn't really matter to me, but my guess is that when the camera was new this must have been a mistake - surely one would buy a camera with a hotshoe?
Testshots
I took the camera and lens on a trip to Stockholm and shot a roll of Kodak Tri-X 400. The negatives are scanned with a lowprice scanner, so expect it to be sharper then this. The colour photos was shot just outside my house, and has been scanned at the lab (waiting for negatives to arrive in the mail).
My opinion
This camera feels good in my hand, it is slim and has smooth operation. I get the same feeling holding a Pentax Spotmatic or actually a Yashica rangefinder. As a contrast I can mention the heavy "klonk" from the Praktica EE2 or Zenit ET, both bigger SLR cameras with some vibration. Somehow I think you can feel that this J-7 has a relation to the rangefinders, some design elements are very similar to my Minister D. And as always, the old Yashicas are sooooo pretty!
The roll of black and white Kodak Tri-X 400 turned out sharp and great, the Kodak Color 400 ASA-film I had some problems with - but not very strange though since it was dark, moist, I probably exposed the film to light at some point and it's a film bought in the local grocery store
This is a camera I will use more, for sure!
Some interesting history was added for me when I searched for info of the camera. On of the things I found was a letter from an american soldier in Vietnam, writing home about the horrible situation of the war but also mentioned he bought a Yashica J-7. I think that puts the age of this camera in som perspective. It's 7 year older then me (I was born 1975).
Links and references
Photoethnography
Matt's Classic Cameras
Yashica Old SLR page
Feel free to suggest new links on this great camera.
Might not be easy to get now.
