Somewhere in the world, there is a warehouse. In that warehouse there is a box. In that box is my Yashica MG-1.
The Yashica MG-1 was the poor man’s Yashica Electro. I bought mine second hand a few years ago and following cleaning and servicing it worked beautifully. I thought of it recently after reading an article on PetaPixel reporting a new camera from Yashica, the Micro Mirrorless - ‘a compact device that delivers professional quality images in a portable package’, according to the company’s Kickstarter page. Could Yashica be back in the camera business? The short answer is ‘no’.
This isn’t a Yashica in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead, another business bought the rights to the Yashica name and is using it to market electronic gadgets, including this toy camera. The Kickstarter page where the business is very successfully raising funds for the camera is a mixture of a hint of honesty, an awful lot of - how can I put this - obfuscation? blarney? lies?, and a striking lack of actual information.
‘Where’s the harm?’ you might ask. The company makes some money. The backers get a new gadget to play with. And, honestly, I wouldn’t care - except for that name. I’m old enough to remember Yashica - the real Yashica. They were one of the (to use that overused word) iconic camera brands. Whether the Yashicamat TLR, the Electro rangefinders, or the FX range of SLRs Yashica cameras made photography accessible to many with high quality but affordable cameras.
What’s frustrating about this is that there is clearly a market for high quality compact cameras. Fujifilm cannot keep up with demand for the recently released X100VI, having failed to keep up with demand for the X100V. I thought of buying an X100V at one point only to discover that the price second-hand, on the rare occasion one was available, was higher than the price new. Just recently Ricoh announced they were suspending orders for the four-year-old GRIII because the company’s suppliers couldn’t provide parts fast enough to meet demand. Sony are still selling, and appear to be still manufacturing, the three most recent iterations of their RX100, the oldest of which first appeared in 2016 and the most recent in 2019.
After mobile phones all but wiped out the market for cheap compacts the camera makers seem to have concluded that there is no place for compacts. Only Fuji, and to a lesser extent Ricoh, saw that there was an opportunity to take compacts upmarket for the photography enthusiast. (Sony have abandoned the RX range to chase the vloggers, so in this respect they too have left the market.) I would love to see more of the big names re-entering the premium compact market inspired by the success of Fujifilm and Ricoh.
Most of the current camera makers have a long heritage - directly or indirectly - in high quality compacts; traditions and histories they could draw on for design and marketing. Canon’s reputation was partly built on the success of their Canonet compacts. OM Systems took over Olympus with their long tradition of innovative compacts - the Pen, the Trip, the XA. Sony might seem out of place here, but Sony’s move into higher end cameras was based on their acquisition of Konica Minolta’s photography business, itself a merger of two famous names from the film era. The first Sony Alphas - the A100 and A700 DSLRs - were effectively Konica Minolta developed cameras with a Sony badge.
Konica made the excellent C35 (I have one of these in the box as well), the higher-end Auto S cameras (one of these too) while Minolta produced the Hi-Matic series.
It’s clearly too late for Yashica, but I would love to see a new high end compact Canonet. I would be first in line for a new ‘Sony Auto S3’ or ‘Sony Hi-Matic’ drawing, not just on the name of these classics, but also the original designs. Just look at the popularity of Nikon’s Zf, a reimagining of the Nikon FM/FE series for the digital age. (And, yes, there’s also Nikon FM in my box.)
So please Canon, OM Systems, Sony, Nikon - the market is there, seize the opportunity.
Wow yes thank you for your thoughts here Olli. Yes you are right I think it would be fantastic if more brands did this! A big opportunity is that Sony could finally release the RX1R III. I think people would definitely jump on that. Also I feel like Fujifilm has paved the way and Nikon has responded with vintage design, I think more camera companies should embrace making their camera bodies feel more vintage and particularity the look too. I don’t think they can ever top Fuji in terms of also their film simulations but I think a lot of people are craving cameras that don’t look like stereotypical A7/R5/z8 form factor. That’s why in some ways the compacts are also intriguing alongside them being so small! I just think companies could go even farther with differentiating them.
Sad to hear about Ricoh GRIII. I had hoped that I would maybe get one in the future