Yashica F521 flickr group

Be sure to visit the flickr group dedicated to this great little toy camera. It's slowly growing and people are posting some great shots!

The discussion area is worth a visit too, with a fair bit of interesting chatter about the camera and its potential.
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Some more vignetting tests

It looks like the vignetting mod is even better than I expected... see within.

Take a look at this crop from the edge of the above. The rocks continue all the way to the edge but see how they get all smeared into oblivion? I didn't quite expect that, but it looks like the vignetting mod has caused some optical issues as well -- bonus!


More images... macro seems mostly unaffected.



Again, look at the (lack of) detail in the lower left. Definitely getting somewhere.



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First Yashica F521 review is up!

Go ahead and click -- here's the first review of the new F521.

Looks like almost everything I wished for.

The one thing I hoped for that I didn't get was the exposure compensation being controlled by buttons or a dial. It appears to be menu based. Depending on how well it meters it might not be much of an issue though.

The colors look very nice and punchy (without going into oversaturated blobs like on many cheaper cameras), the dynamic range appears surprisingly wide (look at how well it holds on to highlight detail), and as I suspected from the CMOS sensor and Yashica F924 shots, it does suffer from "rolling shutter syndrome"; check out how wobbly things get when he moves the camera around!

For the money this looks like a lot of fun, and just about what many expected it to be; a cheap, quirky piece of gear with some personality.

As soon as mine arrives I will post a review of my own!
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