This "Japanese Hasselblad" does things that the original Swedish camera simply can't

Zenzaburo Yoshino was was the third son born into a Japanese family of rice merchants, but even as a young lad, his dreams did not include rice. He was fascinated by photography and dreamed of building cameras.

Though he was not a trained designer, he knew he’d need a crew of skilled craftsmen to build his camera. So in 1947 he opened a camera store and, in the back, he set up a small workshop to manufacture his not-yet-designed camera.

They set about developing the skills and craftsmanship they would need by making high-quality, quite delicate metal fashion accessories such as cigarette cases, cosmetic compacts, brooches and lighters.

He used the Bronica brand name, based on the Japanese slang for 120 medium format-sized film, "buroni" [Brownie] – the camera he dreamed of producing. His products gained a fine reputation and the accessory business blossomed with a large portion of the company’s income being reinvested into the development of a camera.

Yoshino's camera store and his immense personal knowledge of deluxe foreign cameras also became very successful with both Japanese photography enthusiasts and with US Army soldiers stationed in Japan after World War II. Again, a large portion of the income was put towards development of what he called the “Yoshinoflex”.

Yoshino was both fascinated and frustrated by the limitations of the cameras of the day, and envisioned a high-precision interchangeable single-lens reflex camera modular system of his own design that would use medium format film.

He was not a camera designer, but he was persistent. Still, it took eight years to finalize the design and a further four to produce his camera.

In March 1979, Zenzaburo Yoshino finally introduced his Zenza Bronica “Z” at the Philadelphia Camera Show to rave reviews. It was the Japanese answer to the Hasselblad and, in several ways, outclassed the Swedish offering.

It was a 6 x 6cm single-lens reflex camera similar to the Hasselblad in design, style and size, but with several improvements over the original models. It had an instant-return mirror that slid down (rather than flipped up) to enable the use of deep-seated wide-angle lenses.

Inserting the dark slide detached the back, preventing missed exposures or fogged film, and the film could be loaded fully automatically, without lining up start marks. And it had a reliable focal plane shutter with a top speed of 1/1250 sec.

When released, a few months later, it was called the model D (for Deluxe) and had a few improvements. It was an instant success!

The Zenza Bronica

The name was derived from his first name, Zenzaburo, and of course the brand name he’d used all along: Bronica.

The Bronica initially came with high-quality Nikkor lenses, though later models would come with Zenzanon lenses that were sourced from a variety of lens makers, including Zeiss (Jena). But the Bronica Works never made lenses of their own.

The Bronica D did have one most unusual feature. In the late 1960s, I worked in a small camera store when a chap came in with a jammed Bronica D. The owner told him to come back in 30 minutes and it would be fixed.

After the customer left, my boss picked a small screwdriver from a drawer and turned a small screw just above the left strap lug. It appeared to be a button but was, in fact, the “emergency de-jamming screw”. Immediately, the camera gave out a great 'Kerchunk!' and it was fixed.

My boss charged the man $30, which I thought was exorbitant (equivalent to $265 today), but he explained that he was charging not for what he did, but for knowing what to do! (I still think his charge was excessive!).

In my boss' favor, the customer was extremely happy to have his camera working again – and with such speed. Had the owner read his manual, he could have saved himself some serious coin. Later, more reliable models did not have this feature.

To better compete with Hasselblad in the "studio" camera market, Bronica abandoned their focal plane shutter in 1976. The new ETR (for Electronic, TTL-metering, Reflex) model boasted lenses equipped with Seiko between-the-lens electronic leaf shutters that could run from 8 full seconds to 1/500 sec.

It maintained compatibility with the 120/220 interchangeable film magazines, inserts, Polaroid, 70mm backs and interchangeable finders of the earlier models, and offered both automatic and manual metering capability. Of course, the use of a between-the-lens shutter enabled the use of flash at all shutter speeds.

In 1988, following the death of founder Yoshino, Zenza Bronica Ltd was acquired by the lens manufacturer Tamron, which continued to make Bronicas. Hit hard by the digital revolution, Tamron discontinued all of Bronica’s SLR models in October 2004. The last Bronica model, the RF645 rangefinder camera, was discontinued exactly one year later.

In all, it was very successful 46-year run for one very determined young man’s dream.

Find out more about photography's past in David Young's book, A Brief History of Photography.

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Take a look at the best film cameras you can buy today, along with the best Hasselblad cameras and best medium format cameras on sale now. You can also read other articles in David Young's Classic Cameras series.