Yashica City 100 Review: Camera or Scamera?

Apr 29, 2025

Chris Niccolls

Compact point-and-shoot cameras are more popular than ever. I thought they would be gone forever, replaced and surpassed by the modern smartphone but boy, was I wrong. The compact digital camera is experiencing a renaissance and Yashica has jumped into the fray with its City series of cameras to capitalize on the hype.

The Yashica CIty 100 looks decent at first glance.

The relatively poor image quality and retro handling of the cameras, which I considered to be frustrating and undesirable aspects back when I sold them at The Camera Store, are exactly what new photographers are looking for. So I found myself holding a Yashica City 100 in my hand, determined to make the most of it on a family vacation to Mazatlan, Mexico. Yashica declined to send us a review unit, so we just purchased one ourselves for $230.

A close-up view of a white compact digital camera labeled "Yashica City100," placed on a black grid-patterned surface. The lens is prominently featured on the right side of the image. — I like the grip and overall feel of the camera but the cracks begin to show quickly.

Yashica City 100 Review: How It Feels

It is on vacation where the City 100 should absolutely shine. I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much from this latest Yashica camera, having reviewed the earlier Y35 only to find the final results disappointing. However, the first impression of the City 100 was surprisingly good as the camera looks and feels quite solid and has an understated yet adorable appearance that looks urban and carefree at the same time. I soon found some serious flaws, but I’ll get to that shortly. Could this possibly be a handy little camera, or would it turn out to be just another cheap “scamera” instead?

Close-up of a camera lens with focal length and aperture markings, set on a black grid cutting mat with white measurement lines. — The lens is a 3x zoom with a metal ring to secure the magnetic lens cap. This quickly broke.

Close-up of a white digital camera’s top section showing the lens, power button, hot shoe mount, and part of a speaker grill, against a black grid-patterned background. — The hot shoe is actually “hot”.

The City 100 only weighs around 7.7 ounces (220 grams), which makes it practically weightless when touring. However, although the camera is lightweight, it is a little bulky. The City 100 features a 3x zoom lens which covers a very useful full-frame equivalent 25mm to 76mm focal range. This lens has a fixed f/1.6 aperture at the wide end, which migrates to an f/2.8 by the time you get to the 76mm. There is also a toggle-rocker to zoom said lens throughout the range, but the speed is painfully slow and I often found myself frustrated waiting for the camera to respond.

A close-up view of the bottom of a white digital camera with a silver lens, showing the tripod mount, battery compartment, and product label, placed on a black grid-patterned background. — The camera is lightweight and at least has a metal tripod socket.

Close-up of a person’s hands holding a digital camera, with the camera’s screen displaying settings and a landscape view. The background is slightly blurred and shows part of a yellow sign. — The back screen is brutal to use in even moderate light.

The lens also makes the camera quite thick, with a distance from the back screen to the front of the lens of about two and a half inches which is way too big to fit in most pockets. I liked the grip, though, as it provided a secure enough hold on the camera and actually added to the look of the camera, too. There is even a button on the top of the camera that can lock both the focus and exposure in place which is a handy tool and is one that beginners should learn to use even if it is easy to accidentally engage at the worst times possible.

A silver and white digital camera viewed from above, showing its lens, control buttons, and dials, placed on a black grid background marked with degrees and measurement lines. — The Yashica City 100 is not very pocketable due to the bulky lens.

A white Yashica City100 digital camera with a flip-out LCD screen sits on a black grid-patterned surface against a dark background. — The screen can only flip on one axis for selfies.

Close-up of the side of a white digital camera showing a microphone port, a USB-C port, and a hinge against a dark, grid-patterned background. — I like having the USB-C port for easy charging.

The City 100 uses a single microSD card and also sports a removable lithium battery, which is physically identical to the older Fujifilm NP-40 design. I was also happy to see a USB-C port for charging the camera or transferring files. This might seem rudimentary but many affordable camera designs end up using antiquated ports and connections all too often.

Close-up of a white digital camera showing buttons labeled power, AEL/AFL, a camera icon, mode, and a red record button, with part of the lens visible against a grid background. — Controls are basic, but there are enough manual features to explore.

A close-up of a white digital camera with its battery compartment open, showing the slot. Next to it is a blue YASHICA 3.7V 1250mAh lithium polymer battery standing upright on a black grid surface. — The camera uses a decent battery and takes microSD cards.

Yashica City 100 Review: How It Shoots

What really impressed me about this camera was how much control and room to grow there is. Again, I expected the City 100 to be little more than a toy, but it has some manual control and useful color profiles. For a complete beginner, there is shutter priority and program mode control because the aperture cannot be adjusted. This does provide some level of creative control, and you can also set exposure compensation and ISO. Changing settings is a fairly simple process, although the back control pad might look like a dial that rotates, but it is a fixed four-way pad only.

A man and a boy stand in a plaza feeding pigeons in front of a large church with two tall yellow and white towers under a blue sky. — The Yashica is a passable travel camera and I did enjoy using it at times.

A person sweeps the street near a palm tree and a parked white pickup truck under a partly cloudy sky. There are green garbage bins and shrubbery in the background. — The lens is prone to flare and has issues with purple color fringing.

A man rides a bicycle with a bucket on the front along a street, passing by a large arched gateway. Inside the gateway, two people sit in the shade, with trees and buildings in the background. The scene is in black and white. — The shutter delay is lengthy and timing the action takes practice.

Suffice it to say, I started with a positive impression but given enough testing time, I began to see the flaws behind the glossy exterior. The back screen is a basic 2.8-inch display with no touchscreen capability. It only flips around for selfies and anyone who touches the camera naturally assumes that they can twist it, only to find the plastic mount groaning and straining almost to the point of snapping off. This screen is also not very bright and nigh-impossible to see in any outdoor lighting conditions and I often resorted to composing images with a “that feels about right” mentality.

Colorful embroidered bags with vibrant floral and geometric patterns are displayed for sale at an outdoor market stall, hanging against a wall and shining in the sunlight. — Color modes can be nice or sometimes too saturated. You can experiment a bit to find the right fit.

A closed pink metal food stall with sunlight casting tree leaf shadows and diagonal light on the wall. Part of a food sign and some green plants are visible above and to the left. — The more muted “natural” color mode gives a vintage look.

Sunlight streams through an open wrought iron gate, casting distinct shadows on a tiled pathway. The scene is in black and white, highlighting the contrast between light and shadow.

There is a substantial delay when pressing the shutter, which can be anticipated with practice except that the camera often simply refuses to focus at all. It was a fun game consisting of testing whether I would randomly get a green box and take the photo or a red box and not. Moving the camera around slightly and trying again would occasionally make the red box turn green, but it was not ideal. Using this camera for any sort of moving child or pet photography was very difficult.

Two police officers stand by the ocean, while a large statue of a seated couple faces the water in the foreground. The scene is in black and white, with waves and an island visible in the background. — I really liked the black and white mode which actually has good depth and contrast.

A person wearing a sunhat with braids sits on a stone pavement, facing a group of pigeons pecking at the ground. The photo is in black and white, creating a calm, reflective mood. — The zoom is slow but if you are not in a rush it works for most situations.

A woman in an orange shirt and jeans walks past a beige wall with a red fire hydrant outlet. Shadows of a tree and a streetlamp fall on the wall and pavement.

The autofocus surprisingly has a face detection mode and when it decided to work, the results were usually acceptable. Again, with the understanding that movement or changing of distances would frustrate the autofocusing mechanism profoundly.

The lens cap uses a very handy magnetic snapping action to cover the lens. This was great until after about three or four uses, whereby the metal ring that held the lens cap in place simply fell off the front of the camera. The tacky rubber cement that held it in place was clearly no match for the strength of the magnets, but it did do a wonderful job of grabbing every piece of sand and lint it could find. It is no longer attached to our sample camera.

A person stands in the doorway of a long art gallery hallway with framed artworks on the walls and a painting visible at the far end; the scene is in black and white. — Waiting for the City 100 to autofocus was stressful and would often simply fail.

Clear turquoise water flows around mossy rocks and stones along a shoreline, with gentle waves creating white foam at the edges. — Mexico provided lots of different subjects to capture.

Tall palm trees with green and yellowish fronds stand closely together, reaching up toward a cloudy, overcast sky. The scene suggests a tropical or coastal location.

The Yashica City 100 uses a pretty small Type 1/3 sensor, which delivers a whopping 13 megapixels of resolution. In all honesty, though, I didn’t mind the image quality. No one is expecting great things from this lens and sensor combo, and that is frankly part of the appeal. Yashica should have stopped at 13 megapixels. Sadly, there is an option to interpolate the files up to 72 megapixels, which only serves to waste memory and soften the image to unenjoyable levels. I would avoid this trap and treat the camera as a decent 13-megapixel picture taker.

A weathered, pale blue door is partially in shadow, with dappled sunlight and the distinct shadow of a streetlamp cast on it; leafy tree shadows cover the door and surrounding wall. — I liked exploring the streets of Mazatlan and looking for strong light.

Black and white photo of old, weathered posters on a wall, including one advertising “The Beatles” at The Cavern Club. A diagonal shadow partially covers the posters, adding contrast to the scene. — Apparently, one of the mayors of Mazatlan really loved the Beatles.

A tall concrete wall topped with coiled barbed wire is shown in the foreground. Behind the wall, palm tree fronds are visible against a clear sky, giving a contrast between security and nature. The image is in black and white.

I liked the Natural, Standard, and Monotone color profiles and found good use for them in Mexico. The Vivid profile was too extreme for the colorful fabrics and paints adorning the Mazatlan areas, though, so I would reserve that for only the blandest scenery.

A legitimately disappointing feature of the City 100 is the lack of an electronic flash unit; you will only find a weak LED in its place. It’s trendy to get the stark electronic flash look for party scenes and restaurant portraits but the City 100 can only output a meager light that barely impacts the photo. This is a big oversight in my opinion.

The flash is trash and barely contributes any light.

A man with headphones around his neck stands outdoors among trees. The left side shows him with no flash, appearing darker, while the right side shows him with flash, appearing brighter. Text reads "No Flash" and "With Flash. — Here you can see that the fill flash does nothing.

Yashica City 100 Review: Barely Past a Toy

The video quality is also pretty lackluster with the usual over-sharpened and highly pixelated look to the compression that often plagues these cameras. The camera does have 1080 120p slow motion modes that look very crunchy and yet at the same time soft, and there is an option to push the resolution to 5K, although the file size goes way up without any real improvement to image quality. Overall, I would reach for any smartphone to record memories in motion before picking up the Yashica.

The back screen of a digital camera displays a resolution settings menu, with options ranging from 13MP to 72MP. A hand is adjusting settings using the control dial on the right side of the camera. — You can raise the resolution digitally but the image quality is roughly the same and you suffer larger files.

Several hats and a yellow plastic bag rest on a stone wall by the seaside. Palm trees, graffiti on a wall, and a clear blue sky are visible in the background. — Sun, surf, and sand, are all a wonderful part of travel but I could have done all the same shots on my smartphone.

I know I sound disappointed in the $230 City 100 and, ultimately, I am very much so. However, the camera does have some redeeming qualities and certainly takes photos that capture the vintage aesthetic that was intended for it. Sadly, the build quality, which at first impresses, will ultimately let you down and the camera could have benefited from a proper flash that isn’t always covered by your finger. If you want the classic digital camera experience, there are worse ways to go, but the City 100 definitely skirts the line between camera and “scamera” in nearly every way.

Close-up of a digital camera screen showing settings menu. "Shooting Modes" is set to Auto, resolution to 13MP, quality to Super Fine, photo ratio to 4:3, and timestamp is off. A finger is near the control wheel. — The menu isn’t terrible and there is some fun to be had with the City 100 until it breaks.

A man in a red shirt and cap kneels on a stone street, taking a photo with a camera as pigeons walk and fly around him. Other people and pigeons are visible in the background. — If you want the point-and-shoot aesthetic you could probably spend your money better elsewhere.

Are There Alternatives?

There is a Yashica City 200 that provides an even longer zoom range for those who might want more throw. The City series cameras reach a price range where a myriad of used point-and-shoot cameras start to become available for a similar price and they might give you a better experience.

Should You Buy It?

No. I wouldn’t consider the Yashica a good long-term investment, and the cameras are expensive enough that it will hurt when they fall apart sooner than you would think.