The T Zoom (known as the T4 Zoom in the US) is a fixed lens compact camera. I bought it mainly as a keep-in-the-car camera. It has a 28-70 f/4.5-8 Vario Tessar lens and is, basically, a point-and-shoot, fully automatic camera. It uses DX coding for film speed setting, with no override, but, for non-DX films it sets an ISO of 100. So, to use XP2 at ISO100, which I prefer, I just cover up the DX contacts on the film can with a piece of tape. This works fine but there's no way of changing the ISO mid roll. It does have a + or - 1.5 stop exposure compensation which gives some flexibility.

These are a few photographs from the first roll I took with the t zoom.

The first two were taken at 70mm and 28mm respectively. Note the lack of any distortion at either end of the zoom range, though I have seen some pincushion distortion on other images at the 28mm end when focussed much closer.

At 28mm there is noticeable vignetting. I think this is more apparant with a smaller image as here.

Although I don't think it's as sharp as my 28-70 Vario Sonnar, the Vario Tessar is not far behind. The small image here is a crop from the full size scan (at 2820 dpi) of the photograph below. The crop is of the small sign pinned to the gatepost.

I also tried to test the bokeh of the lens but, with no manual control of the aperture it's not easy. As it's not a wide aperture lens, I wasn't expecting anything too gross and, from what I can tell with my inexpert bokeh eye, it doesn't look too bad. The photographs below were taken at 28mm and 70mm respectively. In both cases, focus was on the handle of the nearest cup. The small images show the handle of the furthest cup.

The one thing I have noticed with the t zoom is the fairly close spacing of the negatives - I got 38 shots on a roll. Cutting them proved to be quite difficult. The spacing is also a bit uneven.

Overall, I'm impressed

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