If you wanted to take a selfie in 1960 your options were limited… 

Self-timers as they were called back then, were available on some cameras in the 1950s and early 1960s as a built-in feature. But most were not including Yashica. The answer… a stand alone device that could be attached to the shutter button via a screw thread, and when set gave the photographer about 5 to 8 seconds to join in on the fun of being photographed. Great for group shots or for showing everyone back home your smiling face in your favorite local. I’ve used them (the built-in kind) for firing the shutter during long exposures whenever my camera was securely attached to a sturdy tripod. The Pentamatic was designed in middle 1959 and basically went into the marketplace by the spring of 1960. It was a cost savings plan by the Yashica bean counters (I’m sure that was the case or it was that they rushed it into production and just plain forgot it) to save a few bucks whenever and wherever they could. So no built-in timer. They also left off a built-in or at least somewhat coupled exposure meter… I’ll leave that for another post. So here are two views of the how it was done back then. Surprisingly Yashica used another manufacturers timer (Waltz) in the Pentamatic instruction booklet! The second image corrects that injustice! It appears that Yashica did not make stand alone self-timers but relied on others to supply them. Maybe one or two other companies produced them all with different logos on each, but it is highly unlikely that this is a Yashica made item.

Yashica’s 1959 instruction booklet showing another manufacturers self-timer in use.

How the original instruction booklet should have looked. Yashica branded self-timer with the Pentamatic.

The Yashica Pentamatic was a bold entry into the world, albeit small world at that time, of the fastest growing segment of the photographic industry… 35 mm Single Lens Reflex (SLR) photography. Yashica had grown by leaps and bounds during the decade of the 1950s. In only 7 short years, Yashica was out producing such other well known names as Canon, Nikon and Olympus just to name a few. But Yashica in 1959 was well know for its Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) medium format cameras, excellent 35 mm rangefinder cameras and movie cameras… not SLRs. If Yashica wanted to contend in the “space age decade” of the 1960s, it needed a camera that would bring it into the future and it had to be something the company could strengthen its reputation on. The Pentamatic was conceived in mid 1959 and the first units were produced by December 1959. The marketing team in Tokyo had a large task ahead of them. Convince the world that this new 35 mm camera was worthy of their attention. So, boxes to ship and display their new camera had to be designed. They had to stand out on the already busy retailers shelves and window displays. Sales brochures and catalogs printed. Flyers and pamphlets distributed. Advertising campaigns launched. All this by a planned March 1960 release date! Here is just a small sample of what they produced.

Clean simple lines. Show the customers that this camera was a SLR! Not your dad’s TLR.

An early US sales brochure for the Pentamatic. Back cover design depicted.

No mistaking the details of this new camera… put it right on the box!

Boxes from early 1961… inner and outer boxes.