Yashica's crank-wind 6x6 TLR — affordable fixed-lens entry to square medium format, 1957.
The Yashica-Mat is a fixed-lens medium-format twin-lens reflex introduced by Yashica in the late 1950s. It brought crank film advance to the Yashica TLR range, replacing the earlier knob wind, and sat as a step up from the simpler Yashicaflex bodies. It became one of the more sought-after Yashica TLRs and helped establish the company's reputation for affordable 6x6 cameras.
It is a twin-lens reflex shooting 6x6cm square frames on 120 roll film, twelve exposures per roll. The lens is fixed, with a separate taking lens exposing the film and a viewing lens feeding the mirror and ground-glass screen. Film is advanced by a folding crank that also cocks the leaf shutter, which is mounted in the front lens standard rather than in the body. Focusing is by knob and composition is through a waist-level finder used from above.
The Yashica-Mat is widely regarded as an affordable entry into 6x6 photography, suiting portraits, landscape, travel and general work where a light, quiet medium-format camera is wanted. The crank advance speeds handling compared with knob-wind TLRs. As a fixed-lens design it offers no lens changes, and the laterally reversed viewing image common to all TLRs takes practice.
On a used Yashica-Mat, check the taking and viewing lenses separately for haze, fungus and separation, and confirm the focus knob runs smoothly. Test the leaf shutter across its speeds and check the crank advances film and cocks the shutter reliably, as the wind mechanism is a known wear point. Verify the frame counter and film-wind, and inspect the ground glass for brightness. Non-metered early examples avoid the dead-meter problem but confirm the shutter's slow speeds are accurate.