Canon 7

In 1961 you walked into a camera shop and the Leica M3 was the rangefinder everyone agreed was best. Then Canon put the 7 on the counter next to it for a fraction of the price, with a built-in meter the Leica did not have and a finder that switched frame lines for four focal lengths instead of three. The M3 still felt better in the hand, denser, quieter, more obviously machined. But the Canon answered the one question every working photographer asks, which is what does this cost and what does it do, and on that ledger it won a lot of arguments.

This was the last Canon rangefinder built around the Leica thread mount, the M39 screw flange Canon had used since the 1940s. It is also the camera Canon built to carry the 50mm f/0.95 Dream Lens, a monster whose oversized rear element sits too close to the film to play nicely with a plain screw thread. So they ringed the screw mount with an external three-prong bayonet, a second seat that carries the weight of the f/0.95 and locks it down repeatably, with only Canon's reflex Mirror Box ever made to use it too. Most 7 bodies never wore the f/0.95. They wore a 50mm f/1.4 or f/1.8, which are excellent and a tenth of the weight, and they did fine.

The finder is the real selling point. One bright window, projected frame lines for 35, 50, 85 to 100, and 135, switched by a lever on the top plate, all parallax corrected. At roughly 0.8x it is not the near life-size view of the M3, but it shows you a 35mm lens without bolting goggles to anything, which the M3 cannot do. Focusing runs through a clear rangefinder patch in the middle. The shutter is a thin steel focal-plane curtain stepping up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60, and Canon chose metal on purpose so the sun cannot burn a pinhole through it the way it does through cloth. The trade for that durability is noise: it fires with a clunky, sheet-metal report, distinctly louder than the cloth curtains of a Leica, so it is not the tool you reach for when you want to disappear on a quiet street.

Here is the honest weakness, and it is the headline feature gone sour. That meter is a selenium cell stretched across the top front of the body, and selenium does not last. It needs no battery, which sounded permanent in 1961, but the cells fade and go dead with age, and on a sixty-year-old camera most of them now read low or read nothing. There is no swapping in a fresh battery to fix it, because there was never a battery. When the cell dies, the meter is just a decorative dial. This is the gap the Zone Light Meter app closes cleanly. Take an incident reading at the subject or a spot reading off the shadow you want to hold, then set the aperture and speed by hand. It becomes the working meter the body's own cell can no longer be.

Today the 7 sits where it always sat, as the affordable doorway into Leica-mount glass and a genuinely good shooter for people who do not want to remortgage for an M. Street photographers love the finder and the four frame lines. The people who cross-shop it land on a Leica IIIf or a Bessa R, then come back for that switchable finder. Buy one with clean light seals, expect the meter to be dead, and do not pay extra for a working selenium cell because it will not stay working. Meter it yourself and it is a fraction of the price of an M-mount Leica that takes much of the same glass.