Doubling down on a strange camera – the Canon Photura 135 Caption

I don’t know much about the genesis of the first version of the camera sold by Canon under the names of “Photura”, “Epoca” or “Autoboy Jet”. Being a profoundly original camera (which, because of its unusual shape, probably required some very specific tooling in Canon’s manufacturing plants), I can only guess that the version 1.0 was not rushed to market but was the product of a long and well thought out development process instead.

Case in point, the model that replaced it two years after its launch, the Photura 135, was not that different from the original. It simply addressed some of the weaknesses of Photura 1.0, and its two main points of differentiation over its predecessor were its longer zoom (a 38-135mm instead of the 35-105mm of the first Photura), and the color of its body.

I had been so pleasantly surprised by the first series Photura when I had tested it in the Cabbagetown neighborhood in Atlanta, that I decided to bring it with me to a trip in Corsica, where it did not disappoint, for the most part.

*Canon Photura 135 next to the first Photura – the 135 is painted satin black and bit longer to make room for the 38-135 zoom*

In spite of its size, I found it easy to store in a bag (it’s shaped like a tube, at the opposite of the normal SLR shape, which is more like a long a tube attached to a large brick). It’s easy to keep your right hand wrapped around it when walking around town, and it’s fairly reactive for an autofocus point and shoot. The color pictures I had taken with it in Atlanta had impressed me (the exposure and the focus were tack on, the colors pleasant), and most of the B&W pictures I shot in Corsica and in the Riverside neighborhood happened to be pretty good as well.

My biggest gripe with the first Photura was that it its autofocus system was still very primitive, incapable of focusing on its own on a human being when held in portrait orientation (it needed a complex gymnastic to memorize the focus before re-framing). It also required the photographer to force the focus to infinity when shooting landscapes (by pressing a tiny rubber key at the back of the camera while pressing the shutter release). And the camera missed the exposure in some tricky situations.

*Canon Photura 135 – Ilford HP5 – Marietta, Veterans Day 2025*

The Photura 135 Caption

This “Canon Photura 135 Caption” is another of my Shopgoodwill finds – there were two of them for sale the week I bought it, and only one bidder, me. I picked what I believed was the nicest of the two for $19.00.

Canon created at least three different variants of the Photura 135, the “Base”, the “Caption” and the “Panorama”. Mine is a “Caption”. It can print the date or a choice of 5 messages on the negatives. Cool!

Contrarily to my Photura 105 which was a bit scruffy, this “135 Caption” is in a very good shape, cosmetically. And it’s finished in satin black, with pale, matt gold lettering. It may sound tacky, but it’s done with restraint, and the camera is rather pleasant to the eyes.

*Canon Photura 135 – the specs are listed on the body of the camera*

The Photura 135 is marginally longer than the 105, no doubt because of its longer zoom. I’m not sure that extending the longer focal length is a benefit, though, as we’re losing a bit on the wide angle side (38mm instead of 35mm) and a lot when it comes to luminosity – the largest aperture of the lens varies between 1/3.2 at 38mm and 1/8 at 135mm – which makes shooting with 400 ISO film almost mandatory.

The autofocus system seems to have been improved : the AF frame is visibly larger in the viewfinder, the button to force the focus to infinity has disappeared, and according to the documentation, it now relies on 5 infra red detection beams (!).

*Marietta, Veterans Day 2025 – Canon Photura 135 – Ilford HP5* – *I was facing the November sun and the camera nailed down the exposure – Clear improvement over the first gen. Photura*

The user manual is not very clear but I assume that focus and exposure are pre-determined on a central area of the scene when the photographer presses the shutter release half way and then evaluated again on a larger area when the shutter release button is fully depressed. On the 135 models, a “real-time” feature has been added (the lag time of the shutter release is reduced to 0.018 sec.), and the user manual recommends to use it to memorize the focus point, in particular when composing an image vertically (in “portrait mode”). The real-time mode skips the second focus determination step and only relies on what the central autofocus sensor has detected during the focus “pre-determination”, which acts as a sort of selective AF lock.

*Marietta Town Square – Veterans Day – The tone of the shirt of the man on the left was changed in ChatGPT*

The exposure determination also seems to have evolved positively with a three-zone evaluative system replacing the centered metering of the Photura 105. There is no exposure memorization and no magic +2EV button, but the evaluative metering of the “135” should perform better when the subject is backlit than the simpler system of the first Photura.

*Canon Photura 135 Caption – Caption, Autozoom and Real Time buttons have been added.*

Like the older Photura, the 135 Caption only operates under a single programmed auto-exposure mode, and is deprived of any “scene mode”. Being a camera from the nineteen nineties it does not offer any subject or face recognition capability. But like the Photura (and many Minolta cameras of the same vintage), it uses its power zoom to offer a sort of auto-framing capability, that ensures that in a series of shots, your human subject always occupies the same proportion of the image irrespective of its distance to the camera. I’m not sure I understand what the benefit is, but it seemed important enough to Canon’s engineers, who assigned a dedicated button to this function.

Lastly, the “Caption” version of the 135 gets a bigger self timer button, and the shutter can be fired remotely. The wireless remote controller and the extra strap that came with it originally must have been lost on my copy. Too bad.

*Canon Photura 135 – to load the camera, simply drop the film and pull the leader to the zone marked “film”.*

Testing the Photura 135 Caption on Veterans Day in Downtown Marietta, GA

The square at the center of downtown Marietta is one of my favorite spots – Marietta is a big and modern city 15mi from Atlanta, but the square still has this unique “small town America” feeling. Even more so on Veterans Day.

I was impressed by the Photura 135. The first Photura (let’s call it the 105) was already a good camera, but the 135 is significantly improved – the autofocus is much more capable, and it’s really better at determining the exposure, even in tricky situations.

It’s not a Leica M for sure, but it can be used for street photography, with interesting results. Interior photography is still not its forte – the flash flattens the image – but when this camera was launched, no compact-zoom camera was good at that.

The biggest limitation of this camera is its zoom – or to be precise, its very narrow aperture, in particular at the long end. With a zoom opening at f/8 at the longest focal length, 400 ISO film really looks like a minimum, and at the end of my Marietta escapade, I wished I had loaded the camera with something faster than Ilford’s HP5 (on the Photura there is no way to override the DX coding and push film).

Would I bring this Photura 135 to my next travel destination? Yes, definitely. But I would also bring some 800 ISO film, just in case. The Photura 135 is not as easy to find as the first generation “Photura 105”, but if you’re interested in shooting with a bridge camera, I would recommend you make the effort of locating the “135” – it’s a case of version 2.0 fixing most of the issues of version 1.0.

*Canon Photura 135 and Canon T90 – a family reunion of sorts* – *the Photura is shaped like a tube and much easier to carry in your luggage than a more conventional camera*

*Marietta, Veterans Day 2025 – Canon Photura 135 – Ilford HP5 – S curve and micro contrast improved on ChatGPT*

About asking ChatGPT to “Heal” my pictures – I submitted two of the pictures of this series to ChatGPT – for the first one (the man on the left with the walker) it simply changed the color of the shirt (it was bright white and too distracting). The picture of the two kids on the bench was taken at the end of the afternoon, at the long end of the zoom, and was a bit too soft (it lacked contrast and sharpness). I asked ChatGPT to increase the contrast of the image selectively, without touching the mid tones. It played on the two ends of the S curve and then increased the micro-contrast locally. And gave me a one page long explanation of what it had done and why. Everything it did I could have done with Photoshop if I had a Photoshop license, and was skilled enough to pull it off. I’m normally using Lightroom’s “Heal” functions, but in this case, I could not get the result I was expecting and I had to ask ChatGPT for help.

The originals:

Old gear, B&W film and AI – a match made in heaven? I’m sure we’ll have more opportunities to discuss the issue along the year.

More in CamerAgX

The Minolta AF-C – an ultra compact Point and Shoot from 1983

Canon Photura (Epoca) – a strange looking point and shoot camera of the film era.

This is the other cheap camera I bought on Xmas eve on shopgoodwill.com. I paid less than $14.00 for it. The 2Cr5 battery it needed cost me more.

Launched in 1990, it was known to the North American public as the Photura, in Europe as the Epoca and in Japan as the Autoboy Jet. That’s the first generation model, and the one I bought.

A second model (the Photura 135) was released 2 years later, with a zoom offering longer reach (38-135) instead of 35-105 for the original model and a darker body color. That’s the one presented in Canon’s virtual museum.

Because my copy of this camera was bought in the US, it’s a Photura, and that’s what we’ll call it it for the rest of this blog entry.

Screenshot from Canon’s virtual museum pages

To this day, Canon’s official litterature still presents it as a top of the line camera.

Top of the line, for a point and shoot camera of its day: motorized 35-105 zoom, infra-red based autofocus, motorized film advance, drop in film loading, DX coding, dioptric correction, and all sorts of override modes for the autofocus – nothing’s missing.

The bridge cameras

In the late nineteen eighties (because they had missed the boat of the autofocus SLRs) , Ricoh, Olympus and Chinon started pushing cameras of a new type, that “bridged” the gap between conventional Point and Shoot cameras and Single Lens Reflex (SLR) . Like a Point and Shoot, they had a non removable zoom, and like SLRs, image framing was done through the lens. A flash was also built-in. It made for a large and heavy combo, but in the mind of the people who designed them, those all-in-one bridge cameras were supposed to be cheaper, less intimidating and easier to carry around than an autofocus SLR with an equivalent 35-135 zoom and a big cobra flash.

Because they tried to combine all the features of an autofocus SLR and its accessories (zoom and flash) in one compact design, the bridge cameras looked strange – and their form factor would not be widely accepted by the buying public before the beginning of the digital camera era – when the smaller size of the image sensor made much smaller lenses (and therefore much smaller cameras) easier to design.

The Photura was Canon’s late entry in the bridge camera category – except it was not really a bridge camera. Like a bridge camera it was designed around a 35-105 zoom, with an electronic flash (hidden in the front lens cover in this case) and a hand strap, but it was not a single lens reflex camera – the viewfinder was a simple Galilean design with variable magnification, similar to what you would have found on a point and shoot camera of that era. And the photo cell used for metering did not operate through the zoom lens, but through a separate tiny lens next to it. So did the infra-red autofocus system. Like on a point and shoot camera.

The Photura as it’s generally represented, from the lens side.

First impressions

The biggest surprise is how heavy (600g without its disposable 2CR5 battery), and how big the Photura is. Even considering that the zoom has a relatively broad range and that it’s rather luminous at the wide end (f/2.8 at 35mm), it’s shocking. It’s not as if Canon had integrated a constant aperture zoom in the camera – the aperture at the long end is only f/6.6, and and the reason why Canon recommended using 200 or 400 ISO film. To Canon’s defense, the (real) bridge cameras proposed by Ricoh, Olympus and Chinon were even bulkier and heavier, the Ricoh Mirai tipping the scale at more than one kilogram (2.2 lbs), with a lens less luminous than the Canon’s.

The second biggest surprise is that you don’t hold the Photura like you would hold any other camera. At least when you’re keeping the frame horizontal (shooting a landscape, for instance) and at the wide end of the zoom range, you simply insert your right hand between the body of the camera and the hand strap, and access the zoom rocker switch and the shutter release button with the tip of your fingers. Like you would do with a video camera. It’s not unpleasant, it’s just strange and a bit disconcerting.

The first experience is positive: the camera is reactive, the viewfinder is rather large, and it’s fun to use – for a point and shoot camera. Even if it’s bulky and heavy compared to most compact cameras, it’s still light enough that you can walk for one hour with your hand wrapped around the camera, which makes it a surprisingly discreet and convenient tool for street photography.

Unfortunately, the unconventional design doesn’t work as well if you’re a leftie, or if you shoot at the tele end of the zoom, or if you’re shooting a portrait and keep the frame vertical – you’ll need to hold the camera with two hands.

Another thing that does not work at all is what Canon calls the low angle viewfinder – it’s a second and very small viewfinder located at the top of the camera’s body – it’s so small you have to have your eye just above it (less than a centimeter) or you don’t see anything. In their user manual, Canon write that it’s to take pictures of children. Look at the posture of the photographer shown in Canon’s own user manual – the kids will laugh at the poor guy and will be gone before he can take the first picture. But it works if you’re kneeling, and trying to shoot something very close to the ground, like a very calm dog sitting in his bed.

Photura user manual – courtesy of thecanoncollector.com – note the very unnatural posture of the photographer trying to use the “low angle viewfinder”

Lastly, and maybe it was unavoidable with the technology of the day (and the price point being targeted), the autofocus system still seems to require a lot of work from the photographer: it can not focus to the infinite on its own – you have to force it by pressing a tiny button; it can not focus on tiny objects, and, because its detection zone is a rather small area at the center of the frame, you have to use an early form of AF lock if your subject is off center. Which is often the case if you shoot a portrait and want the focus on the eyes of your subject – not very amateur friendly.

The Photura is very large for a “compact” camera. A zoom of similar range is mounted on the AT-1.

That’s my biggest gripe with this camera – when it was launched in 1990, very good motorized autofocus SLRs were already available from Canon, Minolta, Nikon, Pentax and a few others, and their phase detect autofocus was already more efficient and reliable than what we have here. Their reflex viewfinder was incomparably better than what the Photura could offer – and you could see directly whether your subject was in focus or not (on the Photura you have to rely on a green/red LED that will simply confirm that it did focus on… something). And they also provided more control over the exposure. A Canon Rebel of the same vintage (with its 35-80 kit zoom) was not that much more expensive (only 10% more), was not that much heavier (if it even was), and would have been my choice without any hesitation if I had been looking for my first “serious” camera.

As can be expected, the Photura line stopped at the 135 model. Canon’s next big hit in the compact camera sector would have to wait for a few years, with the very small Elph/Ixus – one of few good APS cameras of the late nineties, which later morphed into the digital Elph, one of the first really good digital compact cameras in the early years of this century.

Even next to an autofocus SLR it’s not really smaller.

What about the pictures?

I loaded the Photura with a roll of UltraMax 400 and spent a few hours walking in an area of Atlanta named Cabbagetown. Its population has almost fully completed the transition from “working class” to “young urban professional” – Teslas, Porsches and Volvos are more common in the streets than old American iron.

I already mentioned that the Photura is a pleasant camera to carry around, and the images it captures are generally very good – sharp enough and correctly exposed – very few are technically deficient. I simply boosted vibrance and clarity to add punch to the pictures shown below. On the other hand, close-ups and interior scenes can’t be shot without the flash, which tends to over-expose massively subjects located at less than 4 ft.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by the Photura. I bought it as a curiosity, but the quality of the images it delivered impressed me. It’s an almost entirely automatic camera, with comparatively simple auto exposure and autofocus systems, and it works very well. Modern cameras will yield much better results indoors, but as a street and travel photography camera, it’s very efficient and a pleasure to shoot with. A keeper. Who would have guessed it?