Do all Cosina-made bodies share the same quality?
I mean, talking about 35mm SLR's, we all have heard that all Cosina-made bodies are similar if not the same in terms of quality and features… However, from the ones I've had the chance to handle with my own hands, this is not always true… Let me put the Nikon FM-10, the Canon T60, the Olympus OM-2000, the Vivitar V3000 and the Yashica FX-3 as examples. As weird as it might sound, from all these bodies I've 'felt' the FX-3 to be the best one, followed by the T60 and the OM-2000 and perhaps the FM-10, leaving behind the V3000 for several reasons of 'weight'…
Am I right Photo Aces? Or it has been just my ultra partial opinion!
Yes, Cosina is not Lomo or Holga, they have standardised quality control so every unit that comes out of the factory will be of the same standard in terms of workmanship. However they do build for many different companies and each company has their own specification. Cosina will build to that specification, so a Camera built for Canon will be different to a Yashica, but not because of Cosina's doing, but because of Canon and Yashica's differing specifications.
The reason there are lots of choices out there's because it's a to each his own doggone world we live in. Haha! It's your opinion and no one should ridicule you about it.
It would make you feel a lot better if you knew that Cosina made cameras for some if not all of those brands you mentioned. Smile!
I have only handled, not owned any of Cosina's SLR's but I regularly use a Voigtlander Bessa R2.
What Cosina does, from my understanding is use the same core body frame and shutter within a number of cameras. They also reuse some of the outward components also. Things like the shutter release button, back door and sometimes the shutter speed dial and rewind knob look identical on some of the cameras you mentioned. This standardization of course reduces cost so as not to have to produce totally unique parts unnecessarily. Pretty smart.
All of the cameras you mentioned are built to around the same quality standards though. They all have plastic body plates with magnesium alloy frames and I think they all have their names/models painted on but not engraved so that the parts the names are on can be used on other models.
However, Cosina also makes Voigtlander and Zeiss 35mm rangefinder cameras and lenses (well, they just stopped the Zeiss IKON which has been discontinued) and the Fuji medium format folder line.
These cameras and lenses, the more recent models in particular, are made to much higher quality standards; metal parts in place of plastic and tighter fit tolerances.
Before I knew about Cosina being "behind all the world's 35mm cameras" I hung out with a guy who used both an FM10 and Bessa R2 and neither of us had any clue they were, underneath, the same camera because the fit, feel and finish are that much different.
When it comes to lenses, the Zeiss and Voigtlander lenses are top-notch, competitive with Leica. Despite coming from the same factory, I can't say that for Cosina SLR lenses I've seen which have fewer aperture blades, plastic barrels and obvious performance weaknesses on an optical level.
I'm quite sure that there are small differences in the construction of all the bodies you mentioned because the plan was probably not to just make one camera then re-brand it; that would be too obvious, but rather just to cleverly reuse major components to reduce costs.
The Yashica FX-3 in particular was made in 1979 when metal and manual labor cost much less than in the 1990's and 2000's when some of these other bodies were built/released. So I'm quite sure that of the examples above, the FX-3 is the nicest built. But notice its shutter only goes to 1000, not the 2000 Cosina standard from the 1990's forward. So the innards are probably very different from the others in this list also.
Good catch!
METAL AND MANUAL! FILM FOREVER!