Good morning you beautiful awesome hardcore, war-torn camera geeks! We haven’t had one of these “mystery cameras” in a while so today I present you with another Mystery Camera for your Flashback Friday and the camera we have today is the Yashica EZ-F521. Now what is a Yashica EZ-F521?! 😎😍😎📸👍🏻

INTRODUCTION

The Yashica EZ-F521 is a five megapixel point and shoot digital camera introduced in 2009. While it bears the “Yashica” brand name, this is NOT the Yashica of yore. This camera was manufactured in China apparently by a company in Hong Kong that had bought the rights to use the Yashica name after Kyocera closed out the Contax/Yashica brand in 2005.

SPECS

The Yashica EZ-F521 was sold as a 5mp digital camera although some I’ve read people saying the camera is closer to 3 or 4 megapixels. There is a 12mp interpolated resolution mode within its menu. The sensor is said to be a 1/2.5 inch sensor.

The lens is a 42.5mm fixed plastic lens. The aperture appears to be either f/2.8 or f/3.2 and nothing else. There is no way to focus the camera other than the infinity/macro setting which is done by twisting the lens to either one of those positions. Shutter speed range is unknown. I found something on the web that says 1/2 sec to 1/2000th but I’ve read others saying they never hit 1/1000th on this camera.

In any event you really don’t have much control over this as the camera chooses the shutter speed as well as the aperture. The ISO appears to be fixed at ISO 100. There is a low resolution 640/480 VGA video mode which can be shot at 30/15fps.

There is also a hidden RAW mode which can be accessed through a sequence of buttons and dials. I forgot what it is now, but I will update this article later to include it. But don’t get too excited though. RAW on a camera like this is overkill. Just sayin’! 🙂

YOUTUBE VIDEO

For those of you who prefer a more “dynamic” experience, here it is! 🙂

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS AND THOUGHTS ON THE YASHICA EZ F521

This camera caused a bit of a buzz on internet photo forums back in 2009 and as a former lurker in those forums, I caught the bug too!

Now despite the horribly limiting specs, with this camera I must admit I was very shallow lol and I was probably most attracted by that eye-catching orange/reddish coating on the fixed lens which in hindsight looks like something from a security camera. I admit, I’m a sucker for a pretty face. Well, in this case, maybe not a pretty face but a strange and interesting face!

I bought the camera back in 2009 or 2010 from a cool guy named Dirk at a site called JapanExposures and yes it came all the way from Japan. I think I paid less than $100 for it.

In hindsight, I really wonder what attracted so many people to this camera back in 2009. I mean, the specs are really uninspiring, the camera body and lens are plastic and there’s not much in the way of control (at least outwardly).

It was probably, in addition to that luscious orange tinted lens, it was probably due to the fact that someone dubbed it the “Digital Holga” that gave the camera its appeal. I’ve seen some great work by Holga film camera users though I myself had never really been a huge Holga/Lomography fan. I mean, soft fuzzy images, vignetting, blurry images can be “artistic” but it’s generally not my thing.

That said, I get it. I know what the appeal of Holga is to people. It offers an alternate reality for people who tire of perfectly sharp, perfectly exposed images. It is a different kind of photographic art. Now even if you’re not a Holga/Lomography fan but you shoot film then you have more in common with the Holga crowd than you might think.

Why do you continue to shoot film with all its inherent grain, its limiting ISO range, its susceptibility to dust, scratches when you have digital cameras today that can blow up sharp images to the size of the side of a large building? It’s because you want something different from the razor sharp images you get from these digital cameras. You want film grain, grit, and imperfections to give your images some personality, etc, etc. Get it now?

When I first got the camera, I thought it was the coolest thing! It was light, plasticky, but at the same time small and pretty cute! No I wasn’t disappointed because I already knew what it was supposed to be. I did not have any expectations of it being a high quality camera and true to form, it was/is not.

This camera is considered to be a toy camera. What is a toy camera? According to Wikipedia: “Within the field of photography, a toy camera is a simple, inexpensive film camera. Despite the name, they are in fact always fully functional and capable of taking photographs, though with optical abberations due to the limitations of the simple lenses.”

This can apply to the Yashica EZ F521 with the exception of “film camera” as it is not a film camera but a digital camera, and even that might be too high a description especially if you’re thinking of today’s digital cameras. It’s almost reminiscent of the early 2mp digicams or early cell phone cameras.

IMAGE QUALITY

The Yashica EZ F521 takes interesting images! “Interesting” is subjective and for me, what I liked about it is an interesting color palette, fun filters, and surprisingly sharp images. Take a look at my YouTube video to see sample images of some of the in camera effects.

Some people have complained that the plastic lens produced images “too sharp” to be Holga-esque but I say you can always take a sharp image and soften it, but you can’t really sharpen up an inherently soft image so I’m ok with its “sharp” images. Keep in mind that “sharp” for this camera is not Canon L lens sharp. It’s more like “I didn’t expect it to be sharp” sharp 🙂

I will say that in general images appear sharper than what you would normally get from a plastic lens Holga or Lomography camera. I guess that’s what they mean by “too sharp” but again, the sharpness is fine for my purposes.

SAMPLE PICS

Here are a few sample pics from this camera over the years. I probably have a ton more but they’re pretty much gone as the one card I used on this camera became corrupted. I probably could invest in some software that might help me recover them but why bother? I’ll make new memories! Anyway, take a look:

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ISSUES

My first and main issue with this camera is that it seems to eat up the three AAA batteries pretty fast. Make sure you have extras laying around.

Secondly, I’ve had two copies of this camera. One I bought brand new, and the other a couple of years ago, around 2017 or 2018. My first one bought around 2009-2010 lasted many years of sporadic usage. Towards the end, it developed a couple of problems. First, the locking mechanism for the battery compartment broke. And then, the SD card slot suddenly refused to hold the card in place. The battery compartment was remedied with tape but the SD card issue could not be remedied. I used the camera’s internal memory which gave me, I think, about ten shots. Though incredibly inconvenient, I used the camera like a film camera for a while until I found my other copy a couple years ago.

The one I am currently using is not without flaws. It seems to eat through batteries faster than my first copy. Every now and then, the LCD monitor shows lines like it’s going to conk out.

I’ve seen some of this before with the Contax N Digital so I’m not expecting this one to last much longer. To be fair though, the Contax N Digital costs a lot more than the Yashica EZ-F521 but reliability wise they seem on par with each other.

In the end, the Yashica EZ F521 should be seen in the same light as the Nishika N8000 and Nimslo 3D cameras in that it is a CRAP CAMERA, as I said about the 3D cameras 🙂

Now don’t be offended if you love these cameras, I do too! I’m just making that statement based on their flimsy build quality. plastic lenses, and their low reliability rates. All these cameras have a high FUN factor which makes up for their negatives but it comes with the caveat of HANDLE WITH CARE.

PRICE & AVAILABILTY

This is a hard one simply because, as of this writing, there’s no copies of the Yashica EZ-F521 to be found. I checked eBay, I checked all over the web. None. And perhaps, there are really not many people looking for this camera but I could be wrong.

I can only base my price estimates based on the average of the two copies I bought. One was brand new in 2009-2010 for $89 USD and one for $40 used. So I’d say if you could find one, a fair price would probably be $40-50 tops.

To aid in your search for this camera, it was also sold and rebranded as the Takashi FX 521 and perhaps rebranded as something else too, but I’m not sure about that last part. I have seen pics of the Takashi so I’m sure about that one.

BOTTOM LINE

The Yashica EZ F521 is NOT a Camera Legend and probably never will be. Nevertheless, it was probably the last digital “toy camera” that had such a buzz around it and for the most part, it delivers on its “Digital Holga” images and fun factor.

It was/is a fun camera to use, not for serious work, but if you consider it an extra “artistic brush” in your camera arsenal you certainly can get interesting results out of it.

Above all, see this camera as a testament to the fact that you will never know what you see on Camera Legend because I love ALL cameras but…I only write about the ones I found interesting!

Wow, I didn’t expect this article to be this long! If you’re reading this till the end, I say THANK YOU! 🙂