Yashica FX-D Quartz

Aperture priority and a quartz-timed shutter, on the same mount that gets you Carl Zeiss glass for budget money. That is the whole pitch of the FX-D Quartz, and it was a good one. This is the electronically automated aperture-priority body that shares the Contax/Yashica bayonet with Yashica's all-mechanical FX-3. The FX-3 sets every speed by hand and never needs a battery to do it. The FX-D does the opposite: you pick the aperture, the body picks a speed somewhere between a full second and about 1/1000, and you shoot. Structurally it is really the cheap version of the Contax 139 Quartz, a de-contented 139 wearing Yashica's badge.

The "Quartz" in the name is the point. A quartz oscillator times the electronic shutter, which meant the auto speeds were genuinely accurate and held that accuracy instead of drifting the way a worn mechanical escapement does. The meter is a center-weighted silicon cell, and the finder reads it out as a vertical column of LEDs marking the speed the camera has chosen, so you watch the lamp climb as you stop down and know what you are getting before you fire. Focusing is a central split-image patch ringed by a microprism collar, bright and quick enough for the fast Zeiss primes. It is a plastic-shelled body, lighter and a little hollow next to an all-metal camera, but it rides in a bag without complaint.

The mount is the entire reason to care, same as with the FX-3. This is the cheapest door into the Contax/Yashica bayonet, which means the Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/1.7 and the rest of the T* line bolt straight on, the same optics a Contax RTS owner paid several times more to use. Yashica's own ML normal lenses are no embarrassment either. Anyone who wanted Zeiss rendering without the Contax price has leaned on this body for forty years, plenty of them students who could not justify the RTS. Flash sync sits at 1/100, fast enough to drop a small strobe into a daylight portrait.

The honest weakness is the exact inverse of the FX-3's bragging point: the shutter is electronically timed, so when the batteries die the camera dies with them. No mechanical fallback speed, no firing without power. The FX-3 keeps shooting at every speed on a dead cell because its cells only fed the meter. This body's cells run the shutter itself, so a couple of spare LR44s in the bag are not optional. The other quiet caution is age. These are electronic cameras from the early eighties, and a dead circuit is harder and pricier to revive than a gummed-up mechanical one.

Use the automation the way it was meant to be used and meter the rest yourself when the scene is tricky. For a backlit face or a high-contrast street corner, the center-weighted cell will average toward the bright background and underexpose your subject. Take a spot or incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place the shadows on the zone you want, then set that on the body in manual or dial in the exposure compensation. People cross-shop the FX-D against the Pentax ME Super and the Olympus OM-2, the other compact aperture-priority bodies of the era. The Yashica wins on glass and loses nothing on price, which is still why it sells.