Canon 7s

Somewhere on a wet street at night, a photographer brings the Canon 7s up to one eye and lands the rangefinder patch on a stranger's collar. The patch is bright, big, sits dead center, and snaps into focus with a contrast you do not get from the squinty little windows on a screw-mount Leica. That viewfinder is the whole argument for this camera. Canon built it large and clear with selectable frame lines, and for a body from the mid-sixties it still reads cleaner than a lot of what came after.

The 7s is the end of the line, the last of Canon's classic rangefinders before the company walked away from the format and put everything into the FD SLR system. It came out around 1965 and ran a couple of years. It keeps the M39 screw mount, the same thread the Leica world used, which means you can hang a Canon 50mm f1.4 on it or a Russian Jupiter or a vintage Leitz lens, with the usual caveat that thread-mount glass is a mixed bag and you focus by trusting the patch. The shutter is a metal focal-plane unit running from a full second up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60. That metal curtain is one of the body's quiet advantages: it shrugs off the pinhole burns a Leica's cloth shutter can pick up from the sun, and it has held its speeds better over the decades. It is not silent like a Leica M, but close enough that nobody at the next table looks up.

What separated the 7s from the earlier Canon 7 was the meter. The 7 carried a selenium cell that needed no battery and aged badly. The 7s swapped in a CdS cell with the readout on the top plate, more sensitive, better in low light, and it reads through a small window rather than the finder. Match the needle, set your speed and aperture, shoot. When it works it is genuinely useful. The problem is that it usually does not work anymore, because these meters were built for a mercury battery that has been illegal for decades, and the cells themselves drift after fifty-odd years.

So treat the 7s the way most people who own one already do, as a meterless camera with a dead gauge bolted to the top. That is where an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app earns its place. You set exposure off the app, you ignore the needle, and the body does the one thing it is still perfect at, which is putting a clean bright patch on your subject and getting out of the way.

The honest weakness is that meter, and beyond it the simple fact that this is a heavy, all-mechanical brick with no automation of any kind. You set everything. The build is reassuringly dense, the film loading is conventional swing-back, and there is nothing to break electronically because there is almost nothing electronic. People cross-shop these against a Leica M2 or M3 and lose their nerve at the Leica price, then find a 7s for a fraction of it with a finder nearly as good and a tougher shutter to boot. That is the cult appeal. It is the working photographer's way into a bright thread-mount rangefinder without the Leica tax.