Canon Canonet G-III QL17

Cross-shop it against the Olympus 35 RC and you understand why the Canonet won the decade. The little Olympus is the smaller, prettier object, and its 42mm f/2.8 is no slouch. But Canon bolted a 40mm f/1.7 onto a heavier all-metal body, and that one extra stop and a half is the whole argument. The Olympus is the camera you carry. The Canonet G-III is the camera you carry into a bar at night.

People call it the poor man's Leica, and the comparison is lazier than the camera deserves. It is meaningfully lighter than an M6 carrying a similar lens, the leaf shutter is quieter than any focal-plane Leica, and you load film by laying the leader across a roller and shutting the back. That is the QL, Quick Load, the thing the name has been bragging about since 1972. No fiddling the sprockets onto a take-up spool in the cold. The rangefinder patch is decent, not Leica-bright, and the 40mm frame line fills most of the finder so you compose nearly edge to edge.

The metering is where the honesty starts. A CdS cell sits in the filter ring, right above the front element, so a lens cap or a thick filter blinds it. In shutter-priority auto, you pick a speed and a needle on the right of the finder shows you the aperture the meter wants. Set it and shoot. Full manual is there too, and here is the part that matters for a fifty-year-old camera: manual mode needs no battery at all. The cell only drives the auto aperture. So a dead meter does not brick the body, it just demotes it.

And the meter will be dead, or lying, which is the one real weakness. The G-III was built for a 1.35 volt PX625 mercury cell that has not been legally sold in decades. Drop in a 1.5 volt alkaline and the readings drift; the usual dodge is to set the ASA a notch lower to fake the voltage, which works until it does not. This is exactly the gap the Zone Light Meter app fills. The leaf shutter syncs flash at every speed from 1/4 up to about 1/500, so meter a backlit afternoon portrait for daylight fill, set the aperture the app gives you, and you get clean fill at 1/500 that no focal-plane camera can match.

Today it sells for more than it should, because every street photographer on the internet rediscovered it at once. It is still the right answer for a first rangefinder: fast lens, real manual control, quiet shutter, no batteries required to take a picture. Just buy one with clean light seals and budget for a CLA, because the slow speeds gum up and the foam turns to tar. Service it once and it outlives you.