Canon Canonet 28

Set the Canonet 28 next to its older sibling, the QL17, and the trade is obvious. The QL17 gives you a fast 40mm f/1.7 and full manual control. The 28 drops to an f/2.8 lens and a simpler brain, and today it costs a good bit less than the QL17 commands. Canon built it for the person who wanted a Canonet without the Canonet price, and that logic still tracks in 2026. Just know going in that the QL in QL17 stands for Quick Load, and the plain 28 does not have it. You thread the leader onto the take-up spool the old-fashioned way, then close the back and wind on.

It is small in the hand, lighter than the metal shell suggests, and built to ride in a jacket pocket. The rangefinder patch sits in the middle of a bright finder with parallax-corrected frame lines, and on a clean copy that patch is contrasty enough to nail focus fast in daylight. Then there is the shutter. A leaf shutter lives in the lens, so no mirror slaps and nothing clatters, just a soft click that tops out around 1/600. You can shoot across a quiet room and nobody turns to look.

Metering is where the body shows its budget. A CdS cell drives programmed autoexposure: the camera sets both the shutter speed and the aperture, and a needle in the finder shows the speed it landed on. There is no full manual exposure the way the QL17 offers, which is the honest limitation here. When the meter is happy you barely think about it. When the cell drifts or dies, and forty-year-old CdS cells do drift, you lose the camera's only exposure brain. It is not quite dead weight, though. With no battery you still get a usable 1/30s and a manual aperture from f/2.8 to f/16, which is enough for flash or a sunny-day guess, but it is a crippled camera at that point, not a metered one.

The flash behavior is worth understanding before you count on it. Yes, a leaf shutter can physically sync at any speed, but the 28 does not let you exploit that. Switch on flash and the shutter locks to a fixed 1/30s. The dedicated Canolite D adds automatic flash metering on top, and the camera still fires at 1/30. So forget any notion of fill flash at 1/600. For real daylight-fill work you read the scene with the Zone Light Meter app, place the shadows where you want them, and set your speed and aperture from that, then add flash knowing it pins you to 1/30.

Who buys one now? Students who want genuine rangefinder feel without the QL17 tax. Street shooters who like the silence and the 40mm-ish view that frames a person without making you back up. People who want one small camera for a weekend. The 28 never became the cult object the QL17 did, but it is cheaper, lighter, and genuinely good once you confirm the meter still reads true.

Shop with eyes open. Test the meter before you trust it, check the light seals (the original foam degrades to a sticky mess and needs replacing), and budget for a possible CLA on the aperture blades. Do that and you have a near-silent daylight camera that costs less than a couple of rolls of film. Skip the meter check and you are gambling on a lens with no working brain behind it.