Konica Hexar AF Titanium

Konica built the Hexar AF in 1993 around one stubborn idea: a point-and-shoot with a real lens and almost no sound. The company had a deep optical bench and not much respect from people who only thought of it as a budget brand, so it fixed a 35mm f/2 Hexanon onto a quiet autofocus body and pointed the whole thing at photographers who might otherwise carry a Leica. The Titanium was a late special edition that landed around 1994, the same camera under a different skin, roughly 1,000 units sold mainly in Europe.

That lens is why the camera survives in conversation. It is a seven-element design whose family tree runs back to an old W-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8, and it is genuinely sharp wide open, which compact lenses of that era usually were not. It holds up against a Leica 35mm Summicron, and that comparison gets made by people who have shot both. Autofocus is infrared, quick in the dark, and the finder is a plain bright-line window rather than a rangefinder patch, so you frame and trust the AF instead of splitting an image. A scale manual-focus mode is there if you want it. Exposure runs three ways: program, aperture-priority, and a metered manual mode, so you do have full control when a scene needs it.

Here is the catch most buyers don't expect. The original black Hexar AF is the one with the cult silent mode, which slows film advance and shutter cocking to a whisper. Reviewers consistently rate it quieter than a Leica M with that mode active, quiet enough to shoot across a small room without anyone noticing, and that is the feature street photographers built a following around. The Titanium, though, left the factory with silent mode disabled over a patent dispute. You get it back through a known button sequence, but out of the box this exact body is not the silent legend. Worth knowing before you pay the collector premium expecting it.

The honest weakness is the electronics. This is a fully dependent body. The shutter is electronic and the whole thing leans on a thirty-year-old circuit board, so when the LCD or the main board fails, repair is brutal because parts are scarce and almost nobody services them anymore. Light seals you can swap at a kitchen table. A dead board you usually cannot, and that risk only grows.

The shutter is a leaf type topping out around 1/250 and syncing flash at every speed, which is the real upside of a leaf design. Meter a daylight-fill scene with the Zone Light Meter app, see exactly how much flash you need to lift shadows under a bright sky, and the Hexar syncs your strobe at whatever speed the reading calls for. The autofocus and program mode handle the easy frames. The manual mode and full-speed sync handle the ones that actually matter, and that mix is what keeps people hunting these down decades after Konica left the camera business.