Taiyodo Koki & the Beauty Camera Company

The Beaumat was the last model to use the 35 Super/Canter/Super II chassis and was essentially a 1958 Super II with a clagged-on, fully coupled, light meter. This family likeness may not be obvious at first sight, but Figure 1 shows four cameras' baseplates side-by-side, and Figure 2 contrasts the rear view of the Super II and Beaumat's top plates.

 

The model's name is speculated to be a combination of Beauty and automatic. Portmanteau words were popular in the 1950s and early 60s.

 

The Beaumat is a bit of an oddity, given that the Lightomatic family had progressed to its third iteration, and had been designed around the incorporation of onboard metering. Whilst aesthetically different, the Beaumat and 1960 Lightomatic II were functionally extremely similar.

The Beaumat shutter was the same Copal-SV found in the Super II. The lens was a new f/2.8, 45mm, "Biokor" (4 elements), with soft aperture click-stops to accommodate in-between settings. The focus ring was scaled in both feet (orange) and meters (white), indicating its intended distribution to USA and European markets.

The word on the street - well the Internet actually - is that the Biokors were made by the "Tomioka Optical Company" (Tokyo). The only information I've found in print comes from "The Evolution of the Japanese Camera", where in an article by Takashi Hibi (JCII) it says ... Tomioka developed a triplet called "Tri-Lausar" for cameras like ... the Beautycord S.  This historical connection to Tomioka would appear to validate the Biokor story as being highly plausible.

 

Tomioka's origins date back to 1924, when optical products were designed and produced for the Japanese military and other industrial clients. The company went on to develop a respectable quality three-element triplet and four-element Tessar-type photographic lenses, which were mainly used on a number of lower-priced 1950s Japanese TLRs. Some of Tomioka's lenses were re-badged. From late 1949, Tomioka became the exclusive lens supplier for Yashica, and in 1983, part of the Kyocera ceramic group following its takeover of Yashica. 

And so, to the elephant in the room ... the Beaumat's most striking feature was the pod-like thing - which resembles an old motorcycle headlight - attached to the side of the lens. This was a housing for the exposure meter centre-the-needle window. The meter was calibrated via a film speed dial around the front of the lens barrel, which accommodated a range of 10 to 1600 ASA. The shutter speed and aperture rings were coupled to the meter, such that the correct adjustment of either would centre the meter needle. The shutter speed and aperture ring were "soft-locked": either can be held steady while the other is turned to affect a setting combination, but they otherwise adjust synchronously which allows a set exposure value to be easily altered for bias towards motion capture or depth of field control in one move (e.g. increasing the shutter speed one step automatically opens the aperture one step). Once either has reached their limit, the rings unlock. 

The top-plate was modestly restyled to give it a little more of a rounded edge, while the bottom-plate retained the unchanged angular corners which originally matched the Super II top-plate. A significant design change introduced the popular 1960 single glass panel to cover the rangefinder, viewfinder and a new bright-frame illumination window. The Beaumat also benefitted from a parallax-correcting viewfinder, the bright-frame alignment adjusting with the focus (see the Glossary for more information on parallax-correction and bright-frame viewfinders).

Other new features were that the film advance lever also functioned as a shutter release lock when pushed-in flush to the camera body, plus there was a return to a more conventional and smaller rewind knob which retained an indentation in the body to serve as a rest/housing for the folded crank arm. Lastly, the shutter release button was threaded to accept a cable release.

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Sales

There were no variants of the Beaumat: the design was unchanged throughout its production, which from looking at serial numbers, appears to be a run of around 12,000. Today they are not especially common but neither are they rare.

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The Beaumat was definitely imported to the UK, at the recommended retail price of £51/19s/9d (Amateur Photographer Camera Guide for 8th June 1960), making it a fairly expensive camera. But it probably sold for the same sort of price as the £39 Lightomatic II with its faster lens.