Canon Canonet G-III QL19

Flip the back open on a Canonet and there are two chrome fingers waiting where the takeup spool should be. You lay the film leader across the rails, drop the back shut, wind once, and it is loaded. No threading, no slot to miss in the dark. That is the QL in the name, Quick Load, and Canon was proud enough of it to stamp it on the front of the camera. Half a century later it still works, which is more than you can say for a lot of clever mechanisms from 1972.

The G-III was the last of the Canonet line, and the one most people consider the best. It is a fixed-lens rangefinder that Canon kept refining through the sixties until it landed here. The 19 means the lens opens to f/1.9, fast enough to shoot indoors on slow film, and it is a genuinely good piece of glass, contrasty and sharp by the middle apertures. The shutter is a leaf type sitting in the lens, running from about a quarter second up near 1/500, and it makes almost no sound at all. A soft click, more felt than heard. You can shoot across a quiet room and nobody looks up. The body is small and dense, brass under the chrome, and it has real weight for its size, the kind that sits steady in one hand.

In the finder you get a bright frame with a yellow rangefinder patch in the middle and parallax marks that shift as you focus close. The patch is clear and contrasty, easy to align, one of the nicer ones on any compact of the era. Focusing is by a tab on the lens barrel, quick once your thumb learns it. The meter is a CdS cell mounted on the lens inside the filter ring, so any filter you screw on is metered through automatically, and it drives a needle along the right edge of the finder. Set the shutter speed, turn the aperture ring to the A mark, and the camera picks the f-stop for you. Shutter-priority auto, with a needle that tells you what it chose.

The catch is the same one every CdS camera of this vintage carries. The meter was built around a 1.35 volt mercury cell that has not been sold in decades, and a modern 1.5 volt replacement throws the auto exposure off enough to matter. People work around it with hearing-aid zinc-air batteries that sit close to the right voltage, or a Wein cell, or they give up on the auto mode entirely. The good news is the shutter is mechanical and fires at every marked speed with no battery at all, so a dead meter does not kill the camera. It just turns it manual.

That leaf shutter has one more trick worth knowing. Because the blades open and close in the lens rather than sweeping across the film, flash syncs at every speed, all the way to the top. That matters most in daylight, when you want fill against hard sun. Read the scene for a balanced daylight-fill exposure with the Zone Light Meter app and that reading pairs with the sync flexibility, so you can shoot fill flash at 1/500 instead of being capped at some slow sync speed. Today the G-III is the rangefinder people buy when a Leica is out of reach, cross-shopped against the Olympus 35 RC and the Yashica Electro 35. It is a working camera, not a shelf piece, and it shoots like one.