Yashica Yashica-Mat 124G

Yashica built the 124G in 1970 to do most of a Rolleiflex's job for a third of the price, and that was the whole pitch. The company had been chasing Rollei with twin-lens reflexes since the mid-1950s and knew it would never win on prestige, so it competed on value instead. The G on the nameplate marked gold-plated electrical contacts for the meter circuit, a small reliability fix on a body that stayed in production into the mid-1980s. For a lot of photographers it ended up being their first real taste of 120 film, the camera that taught them what a negative bigger than a fingernail could do.

You shoot it at your waist, looking down into a ground-glass screen the size of the negative, and the first thing that throws everyone is that the image is reversed left to right. Pan to follow a walking subject and the world swings the wrong way until your hands learn it. The finder is bright for a TLR of this era, with a flip-up magnifier that pops into place for critical focus and a sports frame you can punch out for action. The 80mm Yashinon taking lens is a four-element Tessar-type design, and stopped down to f/8 or f/11 it is sharp in a way that surprises people who paid Rolleiglass prices. Wide open at f/3.5 it softens at the edges, which portrait shooters treat as a feature.

The crank is the part people fall for. One stroke advances the film and cocks the shutter, and the body counts frames and spaces them automatically across both 120 and 220 stock, so you are not squinting at a red window like you would on an older box. The Copal leaf shutter runs from a full second to about 1/500 plus bulb, and it is nearly silent, a soft click instead of the slap of a reflex mirror. That quiet, plus the waist-level posture that lets you shoot without lifting a camera to your face, is part of why it still gets pulled out for unhurried candid and portrait work.

Here is the catch, and it is the one every used listing dances around. The built-in CdS meter was designed for a 1.35-volt mercury cell that has not been sold since the 1990s. Drop in a modern 1.5-volt alkaline and your readings drift, badly in some light. Plenty of these meters are also just dead by now, fogged or unresponsive after fifty years. The honest move is to ignore the onboard meter entirely. A leaf shutter like this one syncs flash at every speed, so an incident reading from Zone Light Meter sets your daylight fill and you fire at 1/500 against the sun without a sync ceiling to fight. Meter the scene properly, set the matching aperture on the lens, and the body does the rest.

Today the 124G sits between a Rolleiflex 2.8F it cannot quite match and a plastic Lubitel it outclasses easily, which is exactly the slot Yashica engineered it for. People cross-shop it against the Rolleicord and the Mamiya C-series, and the Yashica wins on weight and loses on lens interchangeability. Buy one with a clean, snappy shutter and intact light seals, treat the meter as decoration, and you have a medium-format camera that asks very little and hands back a fat square negative for your trouble.