Yashica T4

[whitecat]

Anyone have any experience with the T4 or the T4 Zoom? I understand the Zeiss lens used performs well.

[Brian]

I had a T4: everything you have heard about the excellent lens on it is true. Well worth getting. It overlapped my Leica Mini with the 35/3.5 Elmar: also first rate. The T4 went for a premium...

[Exile]

I bought the T-zoom as a student on a very limited budget looking to shoot slide film with a wide angle lens. It was small and cheap, and sat next to my skin as I climbed in freezing darkness up an ice cliff to 6,000m in the Andes, but there is NO WAY I would choose that camera again. Far better to get a cheap SLR or even better a rangefinder with three lenses of your preferred focal length and speed. I would never again buy a camera incapable of manual exposure and manual focus. I bought the T zoom on a budget when digital cameras were not yet so good and so prevalent in the market place. Hence film SLRs and rangefinders were not as cheap as they are today. You are shopping in a diffrent marketplace, so my recommendation would be to stay clear of compact fixed lens cameras. Go instead for a used interchangable-lens camera, as small as you can find :O)

[Exile]

Accumulating another post before I can link you to an old online gallery taken exclusively with the T-zoom....

[Exile]

Still can't seem to post a link..

Anyway, landscape images are probably the T-zoom's strength. The genuine 28mm wide angle is nice to have. Only a very basic table-top tripod is required because the camera is so light. It can be operated one-handed whilst climbing. The painfully slow apperture is not a hinderance for landscapes. I developed a technique for using a polarising filter with the camera, but it's not straightforward given that you have to cover the ambient light meter with the filter as well as the lens!
On thte other hand, the telephoto end of the zoom range stops at 70mm and is very slow indeed - so this camera is not very well suited to portraiture for example.