Another old Japanese camera brand, long forgotten, was Beauty. The original company, Taiyodo Kōki, which began making cameras just after WWII, went bankrupt in 1957 and was reorganized as Beauty Camera, K.K., producing a number of 35mm rangefinder cameras until 1963, at which time all traces of the company are lost.
The top lens for the Beauty cameras was the Canter-S, a 45mm f1.9 double-gauss lens that contained elements of lanthanum glass and was to supposed to have high resolving power with little astigmatism.
The same lens, it appears, was renamed first the “Beauty-S” and then the “Biokor-S” in later models.
I chanced upon an old Beauty camera for sale for $20, and could not resist taking the chance. The lens is indeed sharp, with an interesting “smooth-but-not-too-smooth” bokeh which I like, although it does suffer from severe light fall-off in the corners. Still a fun lens that gives interesting results. I have just started to play with it, and will add more pics as I go.
