“Experience the legacy of innovation with the Yashica FX-D,” the blurb promises, “a digital revival of the iconic Yashica FX-3 film camera.”
The Yashica FX-D had been revealed weeks before the Kickstarter finally launched in late May. It is indeed a digital camera that takes many of its design cues from Yashica’s popular FX-3 camera first released way back in 1979.
Its creators promise that the camera will be “your first digital film simulation camera”, a description that I had trouble working out the meaning of despite having read it back a dozen times.
A quick look at images of the FX-D indeed shows several features you’d expect on a film camera, including a film advance lever on the right-hand side.
“The lever glides ahead, guiding your mind into focus,” whispers the project’s Kickstarter page. “Every pull of the film advance lever encourages you to slow down and be present. By transforming a quick snap into a quiet ritual and deepening your bond with the subject, every frame you capture becomes a memory you hold close.”
Yes…. but what does this lever do, exactly? Does it free-up the shutter mechanism so you can take another frame? Turn the camera on? Change between the camera’s image and video modes?
No, is the answer. All this winder does is trigger a graphic of a film roll across the camera’s viewing screen.
Film feels in a digital age
The Hong Kong-based company MF Jebsen Group, via its subsidiary JNC Datum, bought the Yashica name back in 2008. Yashica had been a popular brand in the 1960s and 70s, and found further success after it was bought by ceramics company Kyocera in 1983. Kyocera continued making Yashica-branded film cameras until the mid 2000s, when it shuttered all of its camera production.
It took a decade before the new Yashica unveiled its first digital camera design, called the Yashica Y35. Launched in 2018, this camera offered the ability to shoot different colour and black-and-white modes – but only if the right “DigiFilm” accessory was loaded.
You open the back of the Y35, and slip a new DigiFilm into a compartment, much like you would have done with an actual roll of film. The images, however, weren’t stored on the DigiFilm inserts, but on an SD card. The DigiFilms are essentially pre-loaded parameters that simply determined what the resulting images looked like. The novelty is that you load them inside the camera instead of selecting them via a switch.
This innovation – and the fact the digital Y35 didn’t have a screen for which to view the captured images – garnered the camera plenty of attention ahead of its Kickstarter launch. That Kickstarter attracted nearly 7,000 backers which funded the project to the tune of more than HK$10m – more than $1m.
The DigiFilm concept is an odd one – a gimmick, some might think, to try and give further meaning to filters applied to electronic images. I could imagine something like this working really well if a high-end manufacturer had made them really try to emulate those emulsions of old, in the way that Fujifilm lets you shoot with a look that simulates some of their most famous films (more on that later).
But, as it turned out, the DigiFilm accessories were the least of this camera’s problems. The very successful Kickstarter soured somewhat after customers discovered the Y35 was decidedly delicate, with a fixed-focus and fixed-aperture f/2 lens and a 14-megapixel CMOS sensor.
Along its top plate, the Y35 sports the kind of features you might expect on a small film rangefinder the likes of Yashica made in the 1970s; including a film winder and rewind knob. To ready the camera for the next shot, you need to use film winder. But the rewind knob? It signals towards a function the camera no longer requires. You can’t “rewind” imaging filters.
There’s further confusion inside the camera. There’s a slab of metal in the camera installed to give it reassuring weight, as can be seen in the YouTube channel Point&ShootClub’s now infamous teardown of a Y35. (They called it the “worst camera of all time”.) The old “metal hidden in the camera” trick will be familiar to anyone who has bought an old-school “scamera” like the Olympia “SLR”, though you could be forgiven for thinking this kind of thing might have ended in the digital age. We no longer instinctively think something heavy is reassuring; miniaturisation of electronics and better plastics have been dramatic weight savers.
Digital technology has struggling with this trade-off for years. There even a pleasing term for it – skeuomorphism – which was first coined way back in 1890, long before cameras of any kind were an everyday object. It describes the ornamental parts of design from earlier versions where they were necessary. While they have no physical utility, they do have a psychological one: they use familiar shapes to help identify the object’s purpose.
Look at your mobile phone’s apps, and you’re bound to see them: the calendar app that has a spiral-bound diary icon, or the digital wallet that looks like it’s holding your bank cards.
Retro design that resonates
Some earlier digital cameras sometimes retained elements of analogue camera design that actually performed a function, and most of the time it was something useful. Look at the Epson R-D1, a digital rangefinder released in 2004 that put a digital sensor inside the body camera maker Cosina used for their very popular Voigtlander Bessa family of rangefinders.
The R-D1 had a winder just like its film-shooting cousins – but it was there for a reason. Though it had a digital sensor, the camera’s shutter was exactly the same as in the film-shooting models. It needed to be advanced to shoot the next frame, even if this frame was being saved to a memory card instead of being imprinted on a roll of film.
Nikon’s Df DSLR camera from 2013, meanwhile, relied on mechanical dials and knobs to underline the idea that this was a camera for pure photographers (you can’t shoot video on it). An adjustable meter coupling lever means you can mount almost any Nikon F-mount lens stretching back to its beginning in 1959. The camera’s retro, film-camera-like styling is a powerful hint that it won’t shoot like the other DSLRs in Nikon’s range. Retro styling can be a powerful nudge.
Fujifilm’s recent mirrorless release, the X-Half, is a more recent camera that appears to be following this thought. It brings this venerable half-frame format to digital, possibly in the wake of the Pentax 17‘s headline-grabbing success.
Like the Pentax 17, the Fuji X half has been aimed at a younger market who seem to want their digital cameras with a side order of analogue charm. The camera’s half-frame format is a first for digital cameras, and while it’s drawn its fair share of criticism on forums and social media, I can see why they’ve done it – the half-frame format perfectly matches the dimensions of a mobile phone screen.
When you choose the camera’s “Film Mode”, the X half will ask you how many exposures you want to shoot on your “film roll” (36, 54 or 72 images), and you lose the ability to view the live screen until the “roll” is empty. Want to compose your images? You’ll have to use the camera’s viewfinder, and the X-Half’s viewfinder is an optical one, not electronic. (You won’t be able to change the film simulation filter until the “roll” is finished, either.) If you over-ride this mode, the camera “rewinds” the roll, leaving you with an unfinished film strip, just as if you’d rewound a film mid-way through the roll.
The film winder that sits about the X-Half also has a purpose in this Film Mode. You have to advance the film to be able to take another shot, just like you would on a film camera.
Fujifilm’s approach seems, at least to this dedicated film shooter, to be more well-thought-out approach. Limitations like the ones this camera imposes on shooters can actually be helpful, and it may help introduce a new generation to some of the pleasures of more “mindful” photography. But a part of me can’t help thinking that the X-Half’s price tag – it costs a hefty £699 here in the UK – could instead buy a top of the range Olympus Pen F and a lot of film (even at today’s prices). Even DPReview, in a review that was decidedly positive described it as “a profoundly silly camera“.
The FX-D’s vision-less prism
Back to the yashica FX-D: Yashica’s new Kickstarter looks to be following in the Y35’s fund-raising footsteps; at the time of writing (and with more than 80% of the Kickstarter still to go) the project has raised nearly £290,000.
The camera once again borrows the styling of an analogue design, but this time it’s an SLR instead of a compact rangefinder. From the front, you could almost mistake it for one of Yashica’s FX-series film cameras, at least from the renders and prototypes seen on the Kickstarter page. It’s when you head towards the back of the camera that things start to go askew.
Let’s forget the phantom film winder for the moment; above the FX-Ds viewing screen (and yes, unlike the Y35 it has a screen) is a viewfinder hump, just like you’d see on an SLR. The prism is a hump without a cause – it’s simply space for another “Yashica” logo. And if you can’t see through a viewfinder, you don’t need it. Rangefinder and compact cameras don’t have a viewfinder hump because, surprise surprise, they don’t need them. Removing the prism makes the camera smaller. And having one there instinctively makes you want to press your face to the back of the camera and try and peer through it. It’s a truly head-scratching choice. It’s aesthetic without purpose
(To be fair to Yashica, the Kickstarter is also funding another version of the FX-D called the FX-D S 300 which does have an electronic viewfinder – this model will set you back another $100 over the viewfinder-less model.)
Aesthetics over ergonomics?
Yashica aren’t the only company who are riffing off film camera design for analogue “authenticity”. The “retro charm” bandwagon rumbles on. Coming later this summer is another camera that forces you to shoot a “film roll” before it lets you see the results. The echolens camera is due to launch on Kickstarter and will cost considerably less than the X-Half (around $150). The camera borrows some styling from Leica’s iconic rangefinders, but this is surface level: underneath the faux-chrome and marketing speak is the same cheap Chinese-made camera you can buy everywhere from Moment to Urban Outfitters.
There’s no screen on this camera – you have to send the images to your phone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The camera’s makers promise “tactile dials” and a “minimalist feel”, and the camera’s pre-launch website indeed shows some moody details, including a knurled knob that looks like it should be gracing a 1950s rangefinder. I don’t have a foggiest what the knob actually does, however – perhaps all will be revealed when the echolens launches.
***
I asked Wesley Verhoeve, who publishes the popular photography substack Process, his thoughts on this trend.
“I don’t have a problem with these new screenless or limited-function digital cameras as long as they don’t get in the way of actually making photographs,” he told me. “If a simplified tool helps someone focus more on shooting and less on fiddling, that can be a good thing. I totally get the appeal of something stripped down and friction-free, especially for people looking to get back to the feeling of just looking and making.
“That said, some choices, like a winding lever that doesn’t do anything, feel more like cosplay than craft, if you will. Aesthetics for the sake of nostalgia are harmless, but when they pretend to add meaning, it gets a bit silly. Same with leaving out a viewfinder. Personally, I’d always prefer to have one, but I know there are situations, like fast street work or events, where I don’t end up using my own viewfinder either, especially when shooting on film. So I can understand someone enjoying that approach as a creative constraint.”
“I do think there’s a difference between tools that encourage intention and tools that just mimic a vibe. The Hipstamatic/early Instagram filters were about aesthetics layered after the fact. These new cameras at least attempt to shift how you shoot in the moment, which makes them a bit more interesting in my view.”
The surprise news of the Pentax Film Camera Project a few years back – which led to the Pentax 17 – and MiNT Camera’s Rollei 35AF showed that there is still a tentative market for film cameras that look like film cameras. It would be a shame if, from here, we only get those aesthetics on a camera that shoots digital.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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What next to complete the charade? A Bluetooth developing tank that you have to swish some liquid around before you can access the photos on the camera?
An eyefi card, bt connected to a dummy developing tank that you have to shake not very strongly in determined periods of time before it decrypts your picts. Or you can go freemium and pay for not having to wait. Concious!!
BTW what a great site thisone is
Yep. I shoot mostly film, but I have a good full frame mirrorless camera for Astrophotography and those events where I am asked to photograph that require images immediately. It is a Panasonic Lumix S5, great camera, great colour science with in camera JPEGs that need little if any post processing. I follow a couple of social media forums for the Panasonic S series of cameras, and it amuses me how many posts there are looking for film emulation LUTs. And how many posts complaining that the next version of the camera is not out yet!!! Tempted to post images from my 1936 Contax II on there, it still makes beautiful images 89 years after it was made! But we live in a world where appearance is everything to many people, and I suspect that some of those who are shooting film now are doing because it is trendy. These fake cameras will likely appeal to those who want to look hip, but struggle with the inconvenience of learning how to be a photographer. Not for me though!