There was a time, around the turn of the millennium, when the most sophisticated colour a gadget could come in, was “champagne”. A halfway point between silver and rose gold, usually with a bit of a shimmer – it signified a classier brand of electronics. Mobile phones and cameras especially, were often found in champagne. Sadly, it’s fallen out of favour now – but I spotted a relic of this luxury era on eBay not too long ago – a point and shoot camera, available for the princely sum of £10, plus postage.
It’s got a mouthful of a name – the Kyocera Yashica Zoomate 165SE (or 165EF in the US). According to our beloved Camera-wiki, the Japanese cermaics company Kyocera acquired Yashica in 1983, and started producing cameras under the brand name. They also produced the more high-end Contax cameras, as well as a few oddities over the years (a left-handed camera??!).
The Zoomate line started circa 1996, and provided easy-to-use point and shoot cameras with decent zoom capacity, suitable for everyday use. The 165SE seems to be the final camera in this series, being released around 2001, with production of all Kyocera, Yashica and Contax cameras being discontinued altogether in 2005.
The Zoomate 165SE’s specs are quite standard for a point and shoot – the lens starts at 38mm at its widest, up to 165mm at the closest zoom – it packs a lot of lens into a fairly small body, to give credit where it’s due. The aperture varies from F6.7 – F13.1, so not the widest in the world, but capable in good light. Shutter speeds are from 2 seconds – 1/300, again not the fastest, but I doubt anyone is taking this birdwatching, or out in extreme darkness either.
The viewfinder is small and not the clearest I’ve used, with a tendency for the diopter to adjust itself when you’re not looking. The buttons on top are pretty squashy and vague too, with no real way to tell whether you’re activating the autofocus by half-pressing or not.
The 165SE does, however, feature a gimmick most-beloved of late-90’s cameras: a panoramic mask option. Using a slider on the back of the camera, it’s possible to mask off the top and bottom of a 35mm frame, giving a narrow postbox view. While not a “true” panoramic camera like the X-Pan or Horizon, it provides a useful framing guide for landscapes.
First outing – guess where?
As is traditional by now, I popped a battery into the camera and a “fresh” roll of Agfa Vista 200 (I thought I’d sold my stash, but it seemed one escaped into the depths of an old camera bag) and trotted out to the park near my house. We were in the depths of our fifth or sixth heatwave here in the UK, which meant there was no point choosing Fujifilm stock for its lovely greens – the red/orange cast of Agfa Vista was a better choice.
Amongst the hum of grasshoppers, I started exploring the camera. My version came with a date function, allowing for details to be printed on each negative, but I’d turned that off – sometimes it’s fun for nights out, or to get a certain retro aesthetic, but for now I just wanted to make some passable images and check that the camera was working as expected.
Despite the squashy buttons and limited functionality (it has modes! Three of them!), I found it to be fairly capable on my initial outing. It’s not the best at handling extremes of exposure (see the steps image below), or the sharpest compact camera I’ve used (I think my Olympus XA4 probably holds that title), but for a mooch about, it’s not bad at all.
Let’s go to the beach
Satisfied that the camera seemed to be making all the right noises, I took it along to a weekend trip with my bestie, down to the Devon coast. We’d gone for a day of swimming in the sea, lounging on the beach eating picnic food, and a night in one of the UK’s premier hotspots (haha), Ilfracombe.
This was the environment the 165SE was meant for – a holiday, where you don’t want to have to think about shutter speed, ISO or moving from your sunbathing spot to take a wobbly photo of your kids.
I will say that at its full length, the zoom does require a bit of stabilisation. The manual kind only, I mean – leaning on something, or a tripod if you;re feeling fancy. There’s no inbuilt stabilisation here, which did mean a couple of my arty shots of seagulls sitting on poles turned out rather blurred.
After we’d roasted in the sun and marinated in the sea long enough, we made our way from the beach to our hotel in Ilfracombe (reminiscent of Fawlty Towers, with the tiniest lift known to man, a million fire doors leading through a maze of corridors, and absolutely no air conditioning). We decided to potter down the seafront to the harbour, to have a look at Verity, an enormous sculpture by Damien Hirst, that was gifted to the town in 2012. Hirst lives in Ilfracombe, and has loaned the statue to Ilfracombe for 20 years.
She’s a huge and imposing figure, especially with waves crashing at her feet in the evening sun. The atmosphere was made slightly less serious by seagulls perching on her head, and the party boat floating in the harbour nearby, but we still enjoyed a walk around the town with our fish and chip tea.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with this bargain compact camera. It’s a great example of the Shitty Camera Challenge ethos of enjoying average cameras, and being creative with less. I’ve already loaded it up with a roll of Ilford FP4+, so stay tuned for further adventures!