Konica Auto S2

The lens is the reason anybody talks about this camera. Konica bolted a 45mm f/1.8 to the front of the Auto S2 and that piece of glass is genuinely sharp, sharp enough that it punches well above what the body costs on the used shelf. People buy the body to get the lens, then keep it because the rest of the camera turns out to be more honest than they expected.

It is a fixed-lens rangefinder, all metal, and it has weight to it. Not Leica weight, but enough that you know you are holding something. The rangefinder patch is bright and contrasty, a clean yellow rectangle in the middle of a finder with parallax-corrected frame lines that shift as you focus close. Focusing is fast. You learn the throw in an afternoon and after that your thumb just does it. Film loading is the usual sixties bottom-hinge-back routine, nothing clever, nothing that fights you.

The shutter is a leaf, seated in the lens, running from a full second up to about 1/500 at the top. Because it is a leaf shutter it makes almost no sound, a soft tick rather than a slap, and flash syncs at every speed including the fastest one. That last part matters more than it sounds. You can drop a fill flash into a bright noon portrait and shoot it at 1/500 to kill the ambient, which a focal-plane camera simply cannot do. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs naturally with that sync flexibility, since the leaf gives you the whole speed range to balance flash against sun.

The metering is where the years show. The Auto S2 runs a CdS cell and offers shutter-priority auto, you pick the speed and the camera sets the aperture, with a needle in the finder showing the chosen f-stop. When it works it is pleasant. The trouble is the meter was built for mercury batteries that have not been legal for decades, so the cell reads off, and on a lot of surviving bodies the electronics have simply quit. Plenty of these cameras meter fine on a fresh adapter cell, plenty of others give you a dead needle and nothing else. That is the honest weakness. You are buying a sixty-year-old electric eye and it might be blind.

It does not matter much, because the body works fully manually too. Set the aperture yourself, set the speed yourself, focus with that gorgeous patch, and the dead meter becomes irrelevant. This is where a lot of owners land, with a handheld reading standing in for the meter the camera no longer has and the f/1.8 lens doing the rest.

Today the Auto S2 sits in the value tier of the fixed-lens rangefinder world, cross-shopped against the Canonet QL17 and the Yashica Electro 35. The Canonet is a little more refined and costs more for it. The Yashica matches the lens, its 45mm f/1.7 Yashinon is a hair faster, but it locks you into aperture priority with no manual mode, and once its pad battery goes the whole camera goes with it. The Konica's edge is that you keep full manual control and a working rangefinder no matter what the electronics do, and it usually undercuts both on price, which is exactly why it keeps getting picked up by people who want a sharp fast fifty-equivalent in their coat pocket without spending Leica money.