Taxona test roll results

I've had quite the expectations of the Taxona ever since I laid my eyes on it. It's a true pocket camera with all the function one would need on a daily run. Plus, it's a square format, so that's a little special. A sketchbook camera of sorts, I thought of it. Perhaps I wanted too much out of it, or maybe it's simply an adjustment period, but I was a bit disappointed when I scanned my test roll. Let's examine what happened.

For starters, it turns out the 3.5/35 Novonar Anastigmat lens is soft, as can be expected from simple consumer cameras of this age. To my tastes, it's a bit too soft, to be honest. Don't get me wrong, I like my pictures creamy and soulful but Novonar is just... a bit underwhelming. There could be reasons for my thinking that outside of the lens itself, more on that in a minute. In the photos I got, I could see though, that it's not a lens you'd specifically call tack sharp, also it has quite the falloff at the edges and it's mostly only sharp in the middle. While I wouldn't mind all that on a toy camera, on a Zeiss model this is a little disconcerting. My hopes are to get my hands on the version with a Tessar, that should help with that. Because apart from the lens performance, I absolutely love how Taxona handles. 

You push the large film advance lever on the left with just a finger which automatically cocks the shutter as well. You set your aperture and distance smoothly, then click the small shutter release arm and with the most silent clack everything's done. It falls great in the hand, it's the perfect weight and it's easy to hold up to 1/10 of a second (!) without shakes. Everything is within the reach of your fingers, there's no fumbling around honestly because there's nothing redundant or extra on the camera. It just runs itself. It's a hidden gem. Few cameras so far have spoken to me so well.

So, let's circle around to what could be the additional reasons for the lens to perform kind of lowly. Long story short: I put it through quite the ordeal. For starters, in my rush to get some photos on film, I chose a (likely expired) roll of Fuji C200 simply because it was the 24 kind --with Taxona's 24x24 format, you get around 36 exposures on such a roll anyway. And, in my agitation, I must have forgotten where I live. Poland in January usually means no sun to be spotted for days, and everything is mostly shades of grey. If I had gone with a b&w film, I could have sculpted something in terms of textures. With color film, well... I usually shoot for color. And there wasn't much of it available. Also, I shot most of the roll on a walk at dusk, because I'm a rebel like that. It had been a rare sunny day... but I went out too late. Long shutter speeds, low available light, lens wide ope, old unreliable film normally best suited for sunny picnic days. What was I thinking? 

So, all of this, combined with the soft lens, ended up producing rather mediocre images. I am sharing them for posterity, and hoping to do the camera better justice with my further attempts. I'm quite sure it has so much more to offer. It can clearly be seen where there actually is a bit of light playing around in the pictures, creating some sort of contrast. It becomes quite lovely in its own right.