Canon New Canonet QL19

Drop the film leader across the back, line it up to a mark, shut the door, and you are loaded. That is the QL, Quick Load, and it is the reason the New Canonet QL19 stuck in so many bags. Canon launched this one in 1971, near the end of a Canonet run that had been selling by the truckload since 1961. By this point the company knew exactly what it was doing with the line, so the New QL19 came out smaller and lighter than the bodies it replaced, with the fast 45mm f/1.9 lens that gives it the name.

Pick it up and the weight tells you it was meant to live in a pocket and get used. The rangefinder patch is usable, clear enough to focus quickly in decent light, with parallax-corrected frame lines that shift as you focus close. The CdS meter cell sits in the lens ring, so it reads through whatever filter you fit, and the needle reads against a scale in the finder. The whole thing runs shutter priority. You pick the speed, the camera picks the aperture, and the needle shows you what it chose. You can take it off auto and set the aperture yourself, but the meter does not couple in that case, so you are working off the distance scale and an outside reading rather than metering through the camera.

The shutter is a leaf type that runs from about a quarter second up to roughly 1/500 at the top. Because it is a leaf shutter, flash syncs at every speed, all the way up. You can hang a small flash on it at the fast end and fill shadows in bright sun without the speed ceiling that kills fill-flash on a focal-plane SLR. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs naturally with that sync flexibility, since the leaf shutter holds sync wherever you set it.

The honest weakness is the meter, or rather the battery it wants. The original cells were mercury, and a modern alkaline replacement sits at the wrong voltage and skews the reading. People work around it with hearing-aid zinc-air cells or a voltage adapter, but plenty of these bodies arrive with a meter that reads soft or not at all. The light seals are usually crumbling too. Budget a reseal before you trust it with anything you care about.

It still sells today as a fast-lens compact, generally for a good deal less than a fixed-lens Leica, though the used market moves and any price comparison drifts with it. The draw is simple. You get an f/1.9 lens, friendly loading, and a quiet leaf shutter that does not announce itself on the street. Learn the focus scale, treat the meter as a starting point rather than gospel, and lean on the glass. The lens is sharp, and it is the part of this camera that keeps earning its place.