Canon New Canonet QL17

The compact-rangefinder market was crowded by the late 1960s, and Canon's answer was to refine an already-popular line: the New Canonet QL17 of 1969. The rangefinder shrank, the body got cleaner, and Canon hung a fast 40mm f/1.7 on the front. That glass is why anyone still hunts these down. Six elements, sharp wide open in a way that surprised people who had paid Leica money, and a focal length sitting right between a 35 and a 50, so it frames a street scene or a person across a table without you thinking about it.

Shooting it is half the appeal. The viewfinder is bright with a yellow rangefinder patch in the middle and parallax-corrected frame lines that shift as you focus close. You set the aperture or you set the shutter, and in shutter-priority auto the camera picks the other one, with a needle on the right edge of the finder showing the chosen aperture. The QL part is Quick Load, a clever little tongue that grabs the film leader when you drop it across the take-up spool. Close the back, wind twice, done. After a roll of fumbling with a finicky Leica spool you appreciate it.

The shutter is a leaf unit in the lens, running from about a quarter second up to roughly 1/500. It is nearly silent. A soft click, no mirror, nothing to telegraph that you just took the shot, which is exactly why street shooters love it. Because it is a leaf shutter, flash syncs at every speed, and that opens up daylight fill. A reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs with that sync flexibility, so you can drop in fill flash at 1/500 on a bright afternoon and not blow out the background, something an SLR with a 1/60 sync ceiling simply cannot do.

Here is the honest weakness. The meter is a CdS cell that wants a mercury battery the world stopped making, the old PX625. Adapters and zinc-air cells get you close, but the cell ages, the readings drift, and in shutter-priority the camera will lock the shutter if it thinks the light is wrong. Plenty of QL17s in the wild meter badly or not at all. The mechanical speeds still fire without a battery, so the body is not dead, but the automation is a coin flip on a fifty-year-old example. Budget for a CLA and fresh light seals, because the original foam has long since turned to tar.

People cross-shop this against the Olympus 35 RC and the Yashica Electro 35, and the QL17 usually wins on lens and loses on price, since the reputation has pushed clean copies up over the years. It is the camera you hand someone who wants the rangefinder experience without the Leica tax. Buy it for the glass, learn to focus it fast, and meter it yourself when the cell betrays you.