This camera has caused me a few issues and honestly, if this camera was not owned by a friend I might not have bothered.

When my friend Emma left for sunnier climes in Australia, she left me a few items to play with. For instance the Canon T50 and a disposible APS camera, neither of which I liked too much. She also left this camera, which she said she hadn’t had time to use yet. So I said I would try it and see if it actually worked, bonus… it was a camera I have not actually heard of before.

I didn’t find a lot about this it on the net, just this short wiki post and this information about the company which disappeared in the late 1960s. I read somewhere the camera came out around 1963 which seems to fit with the company information.

The information I do have is from observations of the camera and by reading the manual. After you have loaded a film, you have to manually set the counter. The throw of the advance is quite short and this example’s was very smooth. There is an uncoupled, colour-coded light meter on the top of the camera and this example’s responded at it should. If you want to know what the colours mean, there is a speed scale under the lens. It doesn’t tell you which aperture it chooses for each speed. For that, you need the manual which has this diagram.

I loaded the camera with a roll of very expired Kodak Rar film, of which I have a lot and use it in cameras where I am unsure if they work at all. Here are some of the results…

Well, the meter works well, but every shot was out of focus?? Did I make a mistake? Did I set the zone focusing wrong? Or was the film so bad it made things much worse?? Either way I thought I would try another film or maybe half a film, but this time one that I would not be developing and scanning, an E6 film.

Here are some of those results…

They are a little better, but still out of focus. Is this how the camera is supposed to be?? I didn’t think so, even the worst cameras I have tried have produced results better than this. No matter how I set the camera, close or infinity the focus is way off.

As I said, if it was not my friend’s camera I would probably have stopped this point and said it was broken. But no, it is my friend’s camera and I will at least perform some rudimentary checks. So I placed a focusing screen over the film gate and set the camera to bulb. I then set the lens to infinity and then to the close-up setting and checked the image when pointed at a far object.

Well, that made the issue as clear as day. At some point in the camera’s history ‘something’ has changed. The focusing has somehow reversed. The close-up symbol is now where the infinity is focused and vice-versa. Mystery solved-ish, I put some masking tape over the symbols and wrote on the new information.

I recently received a bulk roll of Fomapan 100 and wanted to do a test strip to make sure it wasn’t fogged or anything. So I loaded a short roll into this camera and went for a walk. I tried a few shots on each of the focusing points and then developed the film upon my return.

The results are so much better, not perfect, but better. I am impressed with the non-coupled light meter. BUT, the camera only focuses at infinity, beyond 6m. If you take the camera off infinity, even to focus on something closer it will not work. I do not think this is an issue with all Taron JLs, but this particular example. As this is the first Taron I have tried, it makes me want to get another to see what a ‘good’ one would be like. The 35mm versions are fairly cheap, unless you want their half-frame camera.

I will leave it for now though as I have lots to try, and return this frankencamera back to its owner along with the T50.